


Sunblind

by Folfar



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Post-Canon, Resurrection, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-03-02 08:19:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 20,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13314195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Folfar/pseuds/Folfar
Summary: The sun is in Auguste’s eyes when he dies. It is there when he wakes up, too.





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The unofficial title of this fic is ‘Auguste is back n he is fuckin pissed’, so. 
> 
> Unbeta'd

Auguste is tired. His arms are tired. His hands too. You carry the weight of fighting in your arms first, and then it is your shoulders that burn with the effort. At the very end of the longest and most gruelling sparring sessions, his hands have twinged through the tendons, the spaces between his knuckles raw like they are grinding against each other, against effort itself. In battles previous the final hour had seen his hands burn with pain right at the end, hot with effort and heavy as lead. Here - now - at Marlas, they have burnt for the last three days. He could not play cards with Laurent last night for the pain, as he has done to soothe the worry in those blue eyes these weeks past, and they sat in his lap like dead things instead.

He feels annoyed about this pain in a detached, hindbrain fashion - the front of his mind is scanning the field in the lull as the Achelons regroup and cluster about the banner of their princes - and considers that he has never tended to notice his hands until very tired, when suddenly they are so heavy it seems absurd a man should have these extending from his arms at all. What should a man have instead, he wonders? But that is the delirium of thirst and battle talking, so he dispels it with a shake of his head, and asks for Jord, the youngest of his guard, to bring him a skein.

It’s plump and cold, glossy with condensation, and it soothes his hands, his throat - his mind. He carefully drinks half and lets Jord watch the field with him. Hardly a field at all, now, churned and splintered as Marlas has become after three days of this impossible onslaught. The shape of the land is exposed like the contours of a map. He’s stared at it for so long he would know it in death, he thinks blandly. They are on the third slope of the meadow as it pulls away from the fortress, not truly high ground but higher, at least. The Achelons are a little behind that ledge there, where the treeline was four summers ago, and the prince’s favoured lookout is there, where he sh - but where -

“Jord. Look with me. Damianos - he was resting not ten minutes ago. The banners are there -”

“But the prince is not,” Jord completes his observation grimly. The battle has made him forgo his normal terrified reverence around royalty. Auguste is too busy trying to catch the carmine glow of the cloak and the gleam of the dark head set against it to celebrate that particular long-fought victory.

Movement means change. Movement means a plan set in motion. Movement means that Damianos has thought something and Auguste does not - damn him - know what it is.

He calls for Etien and Geraint to join them - not that any of his guard are far away, really- and they look together. Geraint seems more inclined to knock his eyes against Auguste’s face worriedly than to scan the field. They fear for him in a way they have not before. This is a battle that is going differently from any other. Jord is probably the least aware of this, given his time with them has been these last six months only. Etien and Geraint grew up with Auguste. He has no desire to see them die with him. He has not much desire to die himself.

It’s sharp-eyed Jord that sees him first.

“Look, the bastard’s there. The prince is beside him -”

Etien clucks. “No, lad, look, no cloak. He’d never go without it.” Geraint spits on the ground in agreement. Auguste is not so sure. It is a long cloak and a hot day. He himself kept his tabard but refused his cloak this morning in anticipation of the same. Perhaps he might still be one step ahead of that hulking Achelion after all. Jord is newly bold, he thinks admiringly, watching him bristle at the ‘lad’ - “no, no, it is him - he’s ditched the cloak but there’s no other as tall, surely! Look, the bastard has it slung over his arm. He must have just removed it!”

And true, it is Damianos, supping water as a slave cleans his arms and legs, neck and face. Kastor is recognisable next to him, the red cloak loose in his grip as he speaks to the prince. There is a displeasing symmetry, Auguste decides, in one prince always talking and the other fighting, thinking of what Laurent might say to him. Something snide about the bastard prince, perhaps. Laurent has been amusingly snippy of late, more of a youth than a baby. But the boy-child that has been his brother longer than the cutting adolescent has always been more interested in custom, tradition. He’d keep up an endless stream of chatter to Auguste about the way the Achelons make their red dye, the metals used in their hideous slave collars, the reason why Damianos would be bathing on a battlefield. The strange detachment that has sat on Auguste’s head like a coronet dispels suddenly, and he realises what is about to happen.

Auguste has always been brave. He thinks in snatches, briefly, of things he wants - cool water, friendship, clear days - cakes and ale forever. Perhaps he has had the last of that for a while.

The Achelions are pillaging, rapacious monsters uncontent with their portion, he knows, but he also knows of hierarchy and respect crystalised in their superstructures of engagement, social and military alike. In Achelos one never gives the left hand to a superior, never bows from the waist to a lesser and never - never, he knows - challenges an equal with the blood of others on him. He is the only man equal in rank to the prince here - in another life, Auguste would have addressed him as brother. It is with staggering certainty he knows he is about to be challenged to single combat. He sighs. Laurent will be pushed up against the battlements, leaning over as far as his nurse will let him, ever to be babied in difficult times. Laurent should not watch this.

He says this to the three of them. Etien hmms and Geraint nods and Jord blurts out, horrified, “and you will accept?”

Auguste smiles at him. It is pleasing, as a prince who must be public in all things, to sometimes be an unknown quantity to someone.

“I shall accept,” he says, “and you will be guards to and commanders of all the other men whilst I am occupied, Geraint, Etien.” But what to do with Jord, young and good and loyal? The most important task of them all. “You, Jord - I need you to ride to the fortress, and do two things.”  
Jord nods frantically.

“You will tell of the situation to the commander there, and then you will go to my brother and you will take him away from the battlements, and you will not let him watch. He is as wily as a ferret and as fast as a sparrow - but be clever, Jord, and do this for me. Take your horse and go.”

There is a hint of mutiny in the shape of Jord’s jaw, and he looks as if he is about to speak.

Auguste cuts him off before he can begin. “Do not defy me in this. There will be other battles. This is the most important task to me of all. Go now.”

Jord flushes, and goes.

Auguste turns back to his guards. “My friends. Bring me a cloth to bath my face, and a whetstone for my sword, please.”

As if the hulking Achelion prince should have a monopoly on politeness.

-

The sun is in Auguste’s eyes, and it is adding to the blinding nature of Damianos’ shining sword flashing about them, like it is bouncing light itself back at him. He had been polite, and met the Achelion with a clean face. It is not clean now.

He is filthy with sweat - the brute must be too - and exhausted, eyes stinging, hands burning. Damianos is still bleeding sluggishly where Auguste stuck him through; he is no longer sure if this was minutes or hours ago, the moment when he’d got him, and with a surge of relief thought _finally_ \- and then the prince had surged back to his feet, bullish, unstoppable, barely human. Auguste has held the line for so long, been an unbroken point this whole idiotic battle - and he thinks he might break, and soon. Death should bring peace, surely, to die like a man. But he does not want to die, like a man or not. He can hardly think, but he can feel. He feels a burning hatred for the slaughterer Damianos and his people, for this war, a resentment for all that brought it to this. The parry and slash is constant, and it is more images than thoughts that come to him, now. The bouncing, blinding light is as if it were shining from Laurent’s hair as they ride in the wood. Another dodge. Closer, that time. A feint. Like his horse dodging her halter, playful. Damianos’ swing is so strong - seeing it is like seeing Father spar as a child, like there could be nothing more powerful in the world. There is mud about his feet now. They have churned it up, the two of them, however long this has gone on. Maybe that mud will turn to stone before they are finished; they are too well matched, are they not? Sandstone is Marlas, after all. Another parry from the brute. Perhaps they are not so evenly matched. Why are they out here, why is he here, flagging - didn’t Uncle say this would be easy, that they didn’t need to hide in Marlas, impenetrable, waiting to be starved?

The world turns on its axis. That thought does not stay an image. It overwhelms. It is too overwhelming, and his defence is failing, has failed. Damianos is too close, and there is no time to do anything but move his hands and feet.

When the sword breaches him, he is almost surprised. He thinks, oh. He thinks, oh, it is over. There is a sensation of falling. He sees Damianos’ face, over him, and the sun, behind him. He looks at the sun. It is very yellow. He thinks _Laurent_ -

He dies.

He does not stop falling.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Auguste discovers #relatable content.
> 
> Unbeta’d. Warnings below.

 

Coming to is falling in reverse. 

 

The feeling is like drifting upwards into his own body slowly. He is aware of his head first - there is a wetness around it. Blood - he thinks - he wants to lift his hand to touch it - but his arms are so heavy. Then he is aware of his arms. They are wet too, and cold. His hands don’t burn anymore. It’s like before, when he was so tired they felt like dead things. They are getting wetter. Maybe it’s not blood. Maybe it’s rain. 

 

It would help if he could open his eyes. Such a task seems gargantuan. One of his legs is cold too, but the other hot, burning, like infection or injury. Both, probably. The pain is impossible.

 

Deliriously, he registers it is where Damianos struck him. The sword plunging in his side, very deep. Pulling away from it as it happened - falling backwards - he can imagine such a wound; he has inflicted them himself. The sword is denied the flesh, but the cut will suck at the sharp side of it, and pull a blade’s edge down - the puncture up and almost through the ribs, if you are unlucky, but the flesh torn through to the hip. Not with a prince’s blade, though. Noblemen keep their swords sharp, because they have whetstones and servants and because it makes it easier to remove from a bone or a skull or the side of a prince. He is very conscious of the thought. The image of the sword half gutting him, what it would look like, how his men might have seen Damianos unspool his intestines and then had to parlay for the shame of it. He can’t open his eyes only to see that. He can’t. The breath is rattling in his chest - and even with that abortive movement the pain heaves its way across his body.

 

He forces himself to still, half out of his mind with it. Back, back. What could have happened - wasn’t it a killing blow - isn’t he dead?

 

A sharp sword. If he has his entrails still then - even so, surely - the flesh will be unfolded neatly rib to hip, and his tendons will be cleanly carved apart and if he is alive he will never walk again and Laurent will have to rule because Auguste is not clever enough to be king without the presence of his body, and Laurent will hate it, hate it. People will make him talk to them even when he doesn’t want to and he will never get to study and the people will be cruel to him because Auguste will not be able to protect him or lead charges for him and Laurent will hate him for failing him and Auguste will have failed, failed in all he ever promised Mother and Father and -

 

He passes out again without ever opening his eyes.

 

-

 

His eyes are open and hot, hot. 

 

Everything is bleary and looming, and a dim voice in his head hisses  _ fever.  _ The branches above him press down around him, the world is warped and too small, the air is bullying against his skin. The wet in the air clogs his lungs. Lucidity comes and goes, and brings with it a crackling pain. 

 

The world swims above him, green upon green. A clearing in a wood. A thought comes slowly. From where such greenery - where at Marlas are there still trees? Oh yes, it was no yearlong slog, surely, but a sixmonth of skirmishes and volleys saw all but the ancient woods to the south felled for fuel. Marlas had been all thickets of stripling birch and ash in his childhood, copses of hazel and alder that merged lazily into greater woods, rich with hares for coursing and small springing deer that gave good chase. He had hunted there, weaving through the ruins, laughing with his men, teasing his brother. 

 

Where are his men? He is dead, surely, before they would leave him. Or maybe the Achelons have had their revenge on the failed prince of an enemy nation, and have dragged him off somewhere to die, finally, in ignominy. The thought is almost reassuring - if he is dead, it doesn’t matter that he may have been gutted, and if he has been abandoned, it implies that his gut is still in robust enough shape that he hasn’t already bled out. He must look at it - but lifting his head to gaze at his abdomen can’t be done - to engage his torso is a fools errand, and with or without guts the wound is still burning. If he rolls onto his side he could look, tuck his head into his neck and know, and cease to be frightened. Auguste had realised many years ago that fright and fear were not useful in military contexts, and as such had shed them like an ill fitting cape; he must think of this like a skirmish then, fighting his own self in the wet greenwood. 

 

How to roll. He shifts against the ground and damns his sluggish arms, tilting himself right and straining his head. This shoots a sickening bolt of hurt up his left side, and it settles in the residual pool of pain that has made its home in his leg. His body is pulling itself apart. He can hear his own frantic breath huffing in his ears as his lungs flutter hideously in his chest. Turn. He has to turn. He scrabbles with his foot for leverage - necessarily the hurt one, but what a foolish idea, better to die, surely, than feel like this - but it gives him the thrust to roll ungainly, panting, the side of his face in the wet grass. 

 

He gathers his breathing, but he still feels sweating and sick, limbs quivering worse than before. But he can move his head, and he won’t be afraid. He looks down.

 

There is something hideously wrong, his tabard punctured and gory, saturated with so much blood it is almost black, and wounds elsewhere - his initial estimate was right, he supposes, but his guts are still inside. Or appear to be, which he will take for the time being. Perhaps it is the staggering relief, but he feels better - or not better, but suddenly soothed, out here in who-knows-where, bleeding from the abdomen, probably still dying, probably still at the crest of a fever - or at least distanced from it all, slightly hopeful. Just lie here for the time being, he thinks, and then think of what to do. Just a little while.

 

Time goes on. He looks very hard at a blade of grass close to his eye, and the water that beads on it. He feels the fever crawling back up into his mind, and the world of coherent thought receding. Maybe he will stay here for so long he will become part of this wood, and the grass will push up through his ribcage and his bones will be like bleached roots. He keeps very still, because he is delirious enough he almost likes the thought. 

 

Still enough to seem like part of the wood, apparently, because when his eyes refocus he sees a tall buck hare bound into the clearing. He has a clever looking head, and handsome brinded ears. His eyes are very wary and his left hind thumps the still earth as he sits. Auguste thinks he can feel it in through the ground. Auguste is not without ego, and he thinks of the smart tall hare, prince of the wood, and cannot help but compare them a little. Completely unconcerned with his presence, the hare comes a little closer, and he sees the fine, beautiful shape of its skull and the gleam of its eyes.  _ And both all alone _ , he thinks,  _ some leaders us. _ The hare twitches its nose as if to agree. 

 

This is of course when a stone zips neatly out of the foliage - and distends that beautiful skull with its force. 

 

Auguste only has a moment of horrified sympathy and pathetic self-identification before he is smattered in a delicate spray of hare brains. The smell of blood hits his nostrils. It is everything, the field, the wounds, the not-fear and not-knowing if someone will come after their slingshot - if he wants there to be anyone. He throws up.

 

It is as he hears the footsteps coming through the undergrowth that he realises how terrible an idea this was. The bile is choking his throat, and his tongue is trapped by it. He’s not just panicking - he can’t breathe. He can’t move to vomit properly, and the acrid taste of it is stinging his nose, which is burning too and his swimming, streaming eyes. Even if the footsteps are Damianos himself come to finish him off he would prefer it to death like this, immobile and wounded, choked by his own sick. 

 

The snapping of branches and joyful chatter - falls silent suddenly and - relief upon relief - it is shouted veretian exclamation that he hears.

 

Running feet enter his line of sight, and then knees, shoulders, a face, hands, hands grabbing at his jaw - he almost screams with the pain, but his mouth is full, because the hands are scraping out his sick and clearing his airways. He can finally breathe again, and he sucks in air as best he can, lungs heaving in relief. “There you are, calm now. Help is coming. Breathe for me,” the stranger murmurs, using his clean hand to wipe at Auguste’s face. Auguste struggles to understand it. The man pats at his face, gently. “Stay awake for me, lad. Good.” The hand is replaced by a wet cloth, and it wipes at the grime and the tear tracks and the sick that he feels caked in.

 

“How did this come about?” The man continues, “and are you alone? Where are your people?”

 

Auguste is still dizzy with oxygen, and he thinks of Laurent. Laurent is his people. Father can withstand grief - but who is looking after Laurent? What if Laurent thinks he is dead? 

 

“His highness,” Auguste gasps. “Prince Laurent, is he safe?” 

 

The hand on his face stills. “Their majesties are safe, lad.” 

 

Good. Good. Safe is not everything, but it is first. The relief chips away at his hold on conciousness. The world is receding again, but the stranger’s hand flinches suddenly to his hair, recoils, and smoothes over his jaw. When they speak again, it is with a low urgency. 

 

“Lad, what is your name? You have to tell me your name.”

 

Auguste is so tired. He should say something different, in case they are hostile. But he has never had a talent for deception, and the stranger feels familiar, feels kind.

 

“Auguste”, Auguste of Vere murmurs, as a feverish sleep claims him.

 

“Fuck,” says Jord of the New Artesian Empire, as he looks at the sleeping face of a dead man.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings: Graphic descriptions of violence, asphyxiation, vomit.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Auguste: interior design freak

 

It’s the sun in his face that wakes him properly, the heat of it glowing across his eyelids, rendering the world briefly red before his body catches up and staggers out of sleep. He feels - groggy, aching, alive - thirsty. 

 

And surprisingly comfortable, given the injuries. 

 

He levers himself up and there’s a deep twinge in his abdomen - his hand springs to his side, which proves,  _ ow, _ foolish, but there is no great gutting wound, just what feels like pads of wadded cloth and smartly strapped bandages. It’s a neat job, even by Auguste’s standards, who has been bandaged so often he is a connoisseur. The room is airy and unfamiliar, with shafts of sun cutting across the flagstones. Windows, with light curtains moving gently about them, and the room feels fresh. Auguste feels surprisingly fresh himself, hands free from dirt, almost as clean himself as the crisp bleached-out sheets of the bed he’s lying on. No bad welcome. Probably not in Achelos, despite the sparse decoration of the room. Probably fine to drink the water, then. Not that anyone would go to the trouble of stitching him up only to poison him, he supposes, but the thought of strategising just makes his head hurt. 

 

There’s a pitcher of water on a low table by the windowsill. He blinks, and again, because that  _ does _ look achelion. He can think about where he is when he’s had something to drink. How far down do the bandages go? He swallows down the sick feeling that crowds his throat when he considers his hip. No time like the present, never mind the bile - he steels himself - and - 

 

Blinks down at a hip with a minimal dressing and binding on it. Not exactly… not exactly what he had been expecting. 

 

Well then. He levers himself up and out of the bed, and the wound pulses through him, but he keeps his footing. The pain of it clutches at his mind, and the ragged edge of the fever there.  _ Fuck _ , but it throbs! Not as much as his throat is screaming though, scraped raw and wretched. That’s incentive enough to tolerate it, shuffling across the smooth floor like an old man, very carefully. He think he does very well, until his toe catches on the one raised on the whole floor, which pitches him, retching and cursing, against the table, which leads to another round of patran swears as it knocks his hip. He clutches desperately at it, almost bent double. At least up close now, vaguely hysterical with the pain, he can see that the table is Achelion, after all. There are lions carved along the long edge, the sort of fine bas relief you can’t get past the border without a minimum of three contacts in Mellos and a whole crate of that rosemary liquor they drink like water in Ver-Task. Laurent had seen it once, in a book, and wept himself blue with wanting it. Auguste had - had to wait a month for his next diplomatic expedition, had bartered two fine Veretian greys that he’d bred himself from his best stock, made cow-eyes at an innkeeper who didn’t recognise him in Delfeur, withstood the ribbing from Etien and Geraint’s howling laughter as he had flirted desperately with a wildly amused young merchant who shouldn’t have been south of the border  _ anyway  _ \- had got it for him. Laurent. Was he safe? He hoped he was. The little boy with his lion toy was almost a young man now, and he was brave and clever and father wouldn’t let anything bad happen, even in the chaos of a surrender - or the madness of a castle being sacked. 

 

But the man had said their majesties were safe, hadn’t he. 

 

He pours the water. His hand barely shakes. He drinks until his throat burns less, and thinks about where he is. Looking through the curtain - the land is lush and green. Low woodland. Shrubs and trees - probably good for hunting. Maybe he will be able to ride a horse again, he thinks, tentatively touching his side. This is what he wants. Horses and hunting and greenwood, and no more giving cause to giant Achelion brutes to skewer him. It is so like Marlas - but not struck with war. He likes this better.  It suits the land to be calm. This is how it will be when they have Delfeur back, he thinks. He will build up Laurents’ ruins for him;  even if he can’t ride again, even if he isn’t clever enough to be a king without it - well, he will be a simple builder, and content with it. He’s so caught up in his imagining that he imagines the ruins transposed onto this land, the broken fluted columns catching the light above the trees, glinting white above the wood. He should probably be more concerned about where he is, but it is so good to be in an airy room and looking at greenery, thinking about building things rather than breaking them. He shifts the curtain further to look at the way the land rolls about him. There’s more trees on long, sweeping ridges, though the castle has the high ground. The meadow pulls away from it in long, curving slopes; he counts  _ one, two, three - _

 

He drops the pitcher. It clatters to the ground with a noise like a gong, and splashes him with cold water that he doesn’t even notice because it  _ is  _ Marlas, it  _ is. _ It is Marlas green again - he'd know Marlas anywhere, he has studied it and studied it, would know it’s ridges in his sleep, has dreamt his nights away over it’s formation, where he could hold a line on it, where to use the earth to haul them forwards. 

 

It is like a dream now. How can this be right - it isn't right. It can’t be! What had happened? Even if he has been comatose for months - a tree doesn't grow - nor a forest - not even a thicket, he thinks hysterically. He looks desperately at his hands, but there are no liver-spots on them, like he might have slept a lifetime away in a wood like a poor fool in a story? He angles the window pane at him - his face looks the same, doesn’t it? He has his hair, the same scars, the jut of same twice-broken nose. 

 

What can he remember? He and Damianos, the summons to combat, sending Jord to keep Laurent from the battlements, the men about him, clasping his hand in fealty as he set them at ease, Damianos, unstoppable, advancing. And the blades - and the light - and after -

 

Had there been an after?

 

He thinks dizzly that the world had torn itself apart around him, as he fell. That he had thought it was death. Maybe it was something stranger. But Jord had been by side after, hadn’t he - he recalled that much, and that would have meant his men had been allowed to collect him, had brought him - but no. Jord wasn’t at his side. Jord was with Laurent. And that had been after, too. In the wood. In the arms of Jord, he thinks. Or a man that looked like him. As if Jord’s father had come to rescue him - but had spoken to him with Jord’s voice - as if Jord’s voice would be blurred with an Achelion burr around the sharp edges of his exclamations. He cannot think.

 

-

 

The door bangs open with a triumphant “A-ha!” and it startles Auguste from his shocked reverie on the bed. A sleek young man with flashing teeth in - really - barely  _ any  _ clothes - points at him, winks, and drags in an old man behind him who is panting and out of breath. Auguste supposes he is a doctor, given the hat. 

 

The youth clatters something excitedly at the doctor in -  _ achelion.  _ Then he gives Auguste some really saucy eyes which feels uncomfortable and additionally disorientating before grinning again and trotting out of the room. 

 

The doctor looks at him. Auguste makes a noise, which was going to be ‘what did he say,’ but what comes out instead is a groaning wheeze like a punctured bellows. The doctor is at his side instantly. “Don’t try to talk, not yet. You slept for three days. I had to put a tube down you to give you liquid and its generally -”

 

Auguste shudders.

 

“Yes, quite unpleasant.” He prattles on. But Auguste had not shuddered because of the pipe. He shuddered because the word the doctor used was not  _ tube _ . He had said something very similar, but he had said it in achelion, and not even noticed or given pause. Something is very strange. He produces the honking noise again, and the doctor clucks concernedly at the dented pitcher. He brings Auguste the half full cup all the same. He sips gratefully. Still hoarse, barely comprehensible, he breathes it rather than says it.

 

The doctor hums. He fusses with his hat. Finally, he speaks. “How long since the battle of Marlas? Since the last - well. Four years.” 

 

Auguste feels like his chest is broken open. He wheezes. The doctor calmly passes him the water, which he tilts down his gasping throat. Auguste is still breathing raggedly as the doctor finishes, calm as a man on a morning stroll - “But the first one that mattered? Well. Nigh on twelve years, now.” 

 

This time, Auguste drops the cup.


	4. Chapter 4

There is a fox, out in the meadow. Auguste can hear it through the window, the reedy pitch of its screams like a woman hurting or a boy being kicked. It cuts through the warm air, the sticky post storm dusk, and it slices into the room where the doctor and the near-naked Achelon youth - Pallas, apparently - have been variously patting and prodding and flashing their white teeth at him for days. 

 

The teeth were mostly Pallas, in fairness. He reconsiders. The teeth were  _ entirely _ Pallas. There had been only one other - a  _ woman _ had appeared with food the first time the doctor -  _ Paschal  _ \- had left the room. Auguste can admit that he had shrieked as he had leapt back up to the headboard to yank the sheets over his naked thighs and thus, alas, pulled a stitch in the process, but he has  _ never _ been alone in a room with a woman, as he attempted to explain to the doctor. Paschale had sighed, and called back the youth, and muttered darkly while he painstakingly corrected the dressing. They are ‘resting’ now, but Auguste is too unsettled to drift and too tired to think properly, still.

 

The fox noise brings Paschal’s head up from where it had been nodding slowly into his chest, ‘reading over’ some letters, or something, but mostly napping, in the way that older men do - and the  _ harumph  _ he let out as he jolted back upright was enough to make Auguste stifle a snort, and smile for the thought of Father, doing the same. Paschal looked at him inquisitively, and he stifled it in a cough. Soldiers do not laugh at the people that fix them.

 

Paschal narrows his eyes, and moves as if to rise -

 

“All well Doctor - it was just a cough!” Auguste attempts to head him off, but there he goes, levering himself up.

 

“You might be many things, my Lord, but I doubt  _ well  _ is one of them. More liquids, I think-“

 

He could weep. Liquids upon liquids. He’s never had to piss so much in his life. 

 

“-and then another look at your eyes with the candle,” Paschale finishes implacably. He shuffles from the room. Auguste does not want to do the candle thing again. The doctor has been tracking his eyes, checking how his pupils move, and he had named what he was looking for, but again, the word used was Achelion. But it is not so different from the way a court doctor might prod after a fall or a blow to the head back in Arles, so he has been submitting with an attempt at good grace, despite Paschal’s refusal to let him sleep the night through uninterrupted and the continued flashing of light at his face.

 

He brought this upon himself, though - because when Paschal had coaxed a voice from him properly, already informed of his name but with no recognition of his face - he had panicked. I don’t remember, he had said, because how do you say  _ I think I am dead  _ or, rather,  _ I think I was dead.  _ The blow from Damianos had been very particular. He had never felt like that before, and he had never died before. A simple explanation, therefore, that the feeling had been - death. That made sense. This did not. So instead of  _ I think I might be a decade ahead of myself  _ or  _ I died and now I am not dead _ or  _ I am the crown prince of Vere _ he had said that he didn’t remember - that last he knew he’d still had a half day journey left to Marlas, and that it was all a scramble after. Paschal had hummed meditatively, begun checking his dressings and pressing him with questions. 

 

Where had he come from, why to Marlas - he had said that he had been travelling. From where? From - he had cast around - from Kempt! He had come to Marlas to speak to  _ their highnesses _ on - personal business. He was a second cousin of a royal cousin. Paschal had crinkled his eyes, said “ah, there is a resemblance. And your name is familial then, Auguste!” Auguste had smiled blindly and thanked him for flattery. 

 

“But Kempt, by horse? A months’ journey, surely? You have no taste for sea travel?”

 

“Oh, a long time”, he said, floundering, “on horse, yes. Boats, ah, um. Not for me, no. Bad experiences.” 

 

“Oh, his majesty is the same,” Paschal had said, offhand - and Auguste had thought  _ Father would be at sea every day if he could be  _ \- before Paschal asked after his companions. No companions, he had said. I left them behind, he said, thinking of the drawn faces of his men. It was important to go alone, he said, thinking of the fight. 

 

The old man had rolled his eyes and said “Oh, aristocrats and their bravura solo missions. I have some knowledge of journeys like that!”

 

Auguste had gritted his teeth against the immediate protest and chuckled, because that is what one did when chastised by a man who had saved your life, even if they did not understand. It was important to be polite and to be grateful, he had reminded himself, because rudeness drew the eye, garnered scrutiny rather than sympathy. His false journey was his only protection, ultimately, and he fashioned it in his mind. He had taken it twice before in reality, knew the terrain. He imagined the sturdy gelding that a secondary royal of a backwater province might ride; a solid bay, with black points at muzzle and ears, who had ankles strong enough for the forest and haunches powerful enough to speed the journey. He hated the taste of a lie, but surely it was best to obfuscate as much as he could - and he had kept the image clear in his mind as he asked the doctor of his horse, and it was enough to put real pain into his voice when he heard the expected response that he had been found alone, no horse nor luggage, dying in the wood with a half-gutting wound. 

 

“A wound,” Paschale said, “that is healing far faster than it has any right to.” He continued - “Jord said, you know, that you were still bleeding when he found you, made awful clatter about readying the brazier so I could cauterize immediately - but when I cleaned the wound it was halfway to a scab already!” He had paused to peer at said hip, dabbed at it with ointment, before continuing, absentmindedly; “Not that there was any telling him, of course, because he’d already gone a-galloping off with not even a by-your-leave or a ‘Paschal, so-and-so can make decisions about medical provisions for okton season in my absence, or Paschal, of course I finalised the route for lanolin from the uplands, let me confirm it will be here next week-” The dabbing took on rather more force as Paschal contemplated this dereliction of duty, and it wasn’t until Auguste gave an involuntary grunt of pain that he had started guiltily, eyes darting to the rather glazed look on Auguste’s face, and added, “not,  _ ahem _ , of course, that such things are of interest to you. But a healing wound is a good wound, and provided we have no surprises I think it may all be well.”

 

Auguste’s mind had still been sluggish - as evidenced by his grand explanation of  _ I don’t like boats _ and  _ I forgot - _ but he connected the half-familiar face of his rescuer to the absent Jord. It was not such an uncommon name, he argued to himself. It was not  _ so  _ common either, a part of his mind had said. But Paschal had swept them onwards, asked after the nature of his wounding, pushed him to remember if he had been followed at any point before, if there was any chance this was a vendetta against him or a opportunistic attack. He had feigned even greater confusion, and suggested - bandits. Maybe one of them had hit him on the head. It had probably been bandits, he had said to Paschal. Weren’t there always bandits? Paschal had raised an eyebrow and said, dryly, “it does seem so.”

 

Having achieved his single objective of a backstory, Auguste had been reticent since. The doctor looks at him on occasion from the corner of his eye, considering a profile that Auguste hopes he has explained away appropriately until someone he can trust wholly appears. He asks probing questions, but Auguste recedes into the bloody-minded blankness essential to a royal upbringing in Vere; he could out-blank a brick wall. Geraint once told him he had a thousand yard stare that could bend the world around it, and had not meant it as a compliment. 

 

The problem with this complete reticence is that as the fog around his mind recedes, he is ever more aware of his isolation, desperate for information but lacking the means to ask. How to inquire casually after recent Veretian history when his nearest point of reference is twelve years hence? He wants to know about the blurry-voiced Jord from the woods, who has incited Paschal’s ire so; is desperate to ask about the whereabouts of Father, Laurent; cannot help but obsess over what was made of his blue-gold tabard, emphatically not Kemptian in colour; tries desperately to ignore how strange his first question must have seemed. It is pressing at him, cooped up in this room. Fear is not useful in battle, but this is not battle; rather a becalming, and he is afraid, in honesty, of what the answers to his questions might be. It is all twisting up his mind, even in his sleep. He woke from a nauseating dream last night where Mother had been calling to him, but by the time he had reached her - well. Seeing it once had been enough. 

 

Maybe he could ask Paschal tomorrow. Use a dream as the crux. Say he was confused, and seeking reassurance. The plan is taking hazy shape in his mind when it is interrupted by the door creaking as Pallas eases it open with his hip, carrying a tray laden with steaming broth and a variety of medicines. There’s more soup on the tray than in the bowl. Pallas is not only a ceaseless flirt but a terrible nurse, and Auguste does not understand this Marlas, which permits Achelions not only to assist ageing doctors, but to do so incompetently. Pallas gestures in such a way that indicates he wishes for Auguste to sit up straight and be spoonfed like a child, which will invariably go poorly, as it has done the last three mealtimes. At least there is now less in the bowl for Pallas to burn his chin with.

 

Surprisingly, he starts first with the - blessedly cool - medicine in the flask. Auguste, unfortunately, still ends up with half of down his front, which he will admit is a joint failure. It was brought about by both his jolt of surprise and the alarmed recoil of Pallas’ hand - but Pallas had spoken to him -  _ in veretian. _

 

“ _ What _ ?” Auguste said, with all the grace of a royal heir still drooling green willow-syrup onto his bed linens.

 

Pallas, aghast, responds in achelon, wiping at his own hands before giving Auguste’s jaw a cursory swipe. 

 

Auguste sputters “you managed veretian last time!” and potentially deserves the response he gets, of “yes, before you spit at my chiton! Will  _ stain _ , Kemptian!” It’s not as if he knows enough about laundry to refute this, so he reiterates -

 

“But you  _ do  _ speak veretian, so why not -” he reconsiders. Asking linguistic questions seems fraught, given Paschal’s casual bilingualism and the mere fact of Pallas’ presence, so he takes a breath and continues instead “well, what did you  _ say? _ ”

 

Pallas mutters darkly at the dancing garment he apparently thinks is acceptable for daily wear, which has been barely touched by the extremely green evidence of Auguste’s surprise, and snaps back, “Paschal will come with candle. Later. Get bird, message, get excited about sheep-grease.” 

 

_ Lanolin _ . Jord-who-found-him was arranging the convoy for that. It has been been on Paschal’s mind, and he opines at length on what he considers the failures of this Jord as a commander, a supply chain engineer and a man, whenever he applies salves to Auguste’s wounds. 

 

“From Jord?”

 

Pallas rolls his eyes. “Who else cares? Yes, fucking Jord send bird. Fucking Jord who make me personal nurse of you -” and then lapses into achelon for a phrase that Auguste doesn’t understand but feels rightfully offended by anyway, before being distracted by what he  _ had _ understood. 

 

“This Jord - made you my nurse?” 

 

“ _ Yes _ , Kemptian, you think this is how I spend my time? Soup for poorly men, folding bandages, sponging washes.” He pauses, and, apparently unable to resist the opportunity, adds, “maybe some sponging washes, would spend time on.” He winks. Auguste resolutely does not blush, and Pallas sighs.

 

“Not even flirting to fill time. No hunting! No okton practice! No conversation!” This has apparently been weighing on Pallas’ mind for some time, because he rounds on Auguste, gestures expansively, and says in an ever more heated tone, “not a nurse! Soldier, champion, okay? This is pig-shit, listening to you snore and Paschal complain. Jord says must stay, not choice. Was supposed to go to Ver-Vassel, get fat on salt lard and get fucked by husband, nice politics trip for summer!” 

 

He slumps, sucking on his lower lip with a particularly poisonous expression. Auguste is magnanimous enough to understand that this is probably a stultifying situation for someone not attempting to clarify the logistics of resurrection, despite a personal dislike of Vaskian salt-lard. It is interesting, though. He sorts through it. Pallas is -  _ soldier, champion _ \- presumably a decorated military man -  _ okton  _ \- a noble, if he participates in that barbaric Achelion game -  _ must stay  _ \- trusted by someone who by all accounts is the commander of whatever force that resides in this-Marlas. 

 

Auguste has been thinking about Pallas as an incongruous presence not entirely dissimilar to the carved table with the lions; both glossy, decorative, imported. But Pallas is not just a pretty face being repurposed: Pallas is here for a reason, Pallas is bored stiff, Pallas  _ speaks veretian.  _ Auguste might not be salt-lard, spear-throwing, or willing to undertake conjugal duties, but-

 

“Well, to start with, I didn’t know you spoke veretian, so I can hardly be blamed for a lack of conversation.  _ You _ could have said something.”

 

Pallas mutters something in response.

 

“What?”

 

Pallas flushes, and admits, sulkily. “I said, veretian is bad. Embarrassed by new people. Hard language, tongue noises - difficult for me.” Looking up, he catches Auguste’s eye and says, with a new touch of humour, “Also, you are scary fuck. Mad eyes, big stare.”

Auguse snorts a laugh and Pallas grins back at him. 

 

“Exactly! I thought, nice week, fat, fucking, mountains - but no - scary Kemptian with stare,” he follows this up with an impression which Auguste hardly feels is fair - and continues blithely “no-one else stares like that - well, King does, but he also mad eyes, scary.”

 

The  _ King _ . Auguste feels immediately alert. “The King? The King is-”

 

“Very frightening,” Pallas says sagely, nodding. “You look like him a bit! Worse nose on you, though.” Not that that makes much sense, because Father’s nose looks like nothing so much as a flat strawberry, and Auguste has it on good authority that is considerably less lumpen. Conversation idles for a little bit, and Auguste pulls at loose threads in the blanket. 

 

“Will he be here soon? The King?” 

 

“Yes, Kings will be back soon. Probably what bird message was about. Get everything ready! Councils! Banquets! Court! Wedding anniversary, you know?” Pallas is smiling as he says it, half fond, casually. Auguste does not, in fact, know. He says so, haltingly, as the plurals sink in. “Sorry - Kings _? _ Their… royal highnesses? A  _ wedding?” _ Perhaps a brush of hysteria on that one.

 

Pallas moves as if to respond, but Auguste flaps a hand at him, attempts to breath deeply through his nose. He thinks he might panic, “Pallas, who rules here? Humor me.” 

 

He smiles, bemused, and says “King Laurent -”

 

Auguste sags with relief. Laurent is alive, Laurent is King. Laurent is married, and thus protected, stable. Probably a Kemptian, a Patran, alliance-forming, practical. This world is strange but reassuring. All is well. The feeling does not last a particularly long time.

  
“-and his husband, Damianos-Exalted, of course, ” Pallas laughs, and says "Kemptian, how long _have_   you been away?"

 

Auguste does not feel like laughing. Auguste hardly hears; he thinks of Marlas green again, Marlas calm. He thinks of the woods grown back, and the land re-sown. He thinks of the reedy scream of the fox, winding through it all, like a boy hurting.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> EMBARRASSING ADMISSION: If you notice any egregious deviations from canon you are almost certainly correct, as I do not have my copies of the books with me. I actually bought a new copy of Kings Rising to revise with, but we're too far gone by this point, so! Please enjoy chapter five of 'Auguste has an extremely bad time'.

Pallas’ words haunt him.

He arranges histories about himself like maps on a great table. First he thinks – _I am in Achelos after all. They retreated after – my death_ , he says to himself sternly – _and Delfeur was lost._ What then, he thinks? Father married Laurent off to Damianos? No. Well – yes, Auguste was always more his father’s concern than Laurent, the chubby baby on Mother’s lap, but he loved him, they were both of them loved. It would never have happened willingly – but isn’t that worse? Then – _Father rules in a diminished Vere_.

Theomedes would not settle for Delfeur if he could have more – and perhaps Laurent is part of that more, a greater humiliation, a child-hostage, just the right age for a betrothal. Father rules in a diminished Vere and Laurent was – was taken? But taken with treaties and politics and bloodless pieces of paper.

He feels bleakly this is must be so, and it rearranges his family in his mind, no matter how he wishes it would not. Everything begins to reshape itself around him. He becomes suspicious of Paschal. How does he not recognise Auguste – should Auguste recognise him? He has never had the best head for faces – he has never had to think how serving in the court of a monstrous invader might age a face he should rightly know. Didn’t one of the court physicians have a name that began with P? He had been an extremely hale and hearty child, unlike Laurent, whip-slim, prone to fevers, always with Mother and a doctor hovering nearby. In honesty, he wouldn’t have recognised half of the court in Arles. It was always easier to be a little distant. It feels foolish now.

He stews. The Kings – thinking it makes him shudder – continue to be absent. Jord’s bird apparently brought no news but a pacifying update on the transport of Paschal’s longed-for lanolin. He lies in bed, he has his dressings changed, he chats idly with Paschal, he loses at cards to Pallas, who cheats gleefully. He forgives him; Achelions are a pushy lot.

That tendency makes him consider other possibilities. Theomedes would push too, wouldn’t he. Perhaps this unnatural graft of Achelos onto Vere is a kingdom occupied. Perhaps Vere is no more because Damianos rules it through Laurent, with Theomedes hearty and hale in Ios and – perhaps, he thinks desperately, with Father retired to grace and favour home in Varenne, or Lys. To keep the peace. Perhaps, perhaps. Father will be past sixty, now. His hair will be more silver than blonde. Maybe his nose will be even redder and larger than it was before. He hopes against hope.

How to ask? How to clarify, against the ragged edges of his points of reference? One of his guardsman, years ago, had cracked his head against a rock, and not known his own wife when he woke, nor his friends. It had been quite the scandal, though, because he had known some things, and asked for them quite baldly. Namely, his – female – mistress. The selective forgetting, then – it was not impossible. Paschal is a doctor. He will know of such things.

He brings it up after breakfast one day, with Pallas absent. Auguste will frame it around fear for his mind. “I had to see their highnesses,” Auguste says, “that was the point of the ride.”

Paschal murmurs in agreement, fussing about the dressings on his hip. It is easier to speak to the hat.

“I do not wish to insult their highnesses, when they are here. But.” He takes a breath. “I think the incident has scrambled my brain more than we thought,” he confesses.

“I rode here with a message – which I know still. But I think to who it was for – and it is not clear, anymore. I know the words.” Paschal looks up at him, hands stilling.

“But I woke – and I thought it was for my – I thought Aleron king.”

The doctor flinches.

“Pallas tells me this is not so,” he plunges on.

“I was a boy last time I was in Vere. Less a man, more a child. I met the King – my aunt, their children.” Auguste’s childhood had been rife with cousins. It is not implausible. “And now,” he continues “– I cannot see past that.”

Paschal hems concernedly and moves to sit heavily in the chair by Auguste’s head.

“Everything I think I should know of this country is a blur,” he says. “Everything since I was a child seems out of reach.” Is this too much? No, a man would be distressed to forget, surely? He is no good at this. He hurries to add “- I did not think of Vere much, you understand, but it is like my brain has lost it to keep the rest of my mind intact.”

The guard had said he only ever cared for the other woman. _She was the thing I wanted to keep the most,_ he had said defiantly to Auguste, before he had been thrown out of the castle. Paschal does not speak, and there is a drawn look about his face.

“I think to ask this may pain you-” he says carefully, “and I do not seek to cause you such pain. But I need that knowledge, to make sense of my task. Will you tell me, Paschal? Pallas said – Pallas said Aleron does not rule. Any longer.”  

The old man smoothes the sheet under his hands. He speaks more to the bed than to Auguste when he begins.

“It is painful to talk of, you understand. Even now things are well – it was not well for some time.” Auguste’s heart clenches. “Marlas was such a dreadful mess-”

Auguste can’t help but bark a bitter laugh. “Yes,” he says.

Paschal snaps his eyes towards him. “You remember this? You remember you asked after Marlas. It was the first thing you said to me?”

Fucking fool, he curses himself. Idiot, simpleton! Kempt was not at Marlas – Kemptians were not at Marlas, with Hennike his mother dead. That was the point. That was why Marlas had been able to happen.

He calls back that blankness that he had done so well by thus far and searches for an explanation. “It was the first time I saw men die in such numbers,” he stutters. “I remember Marlas – I could not forget that.” Solemn enough to give him a lull, he reframes it in his head, if it was twelve years past rather than last week – through the eyes of a child. “I was the same age as the youngest prince, I was there as a squire.” Paschal frowns a little, seems to raise an eyebrow involuntarily.

“What do you remember of that, Auguste?”

“Well - we join the men early in Kempt–“ that was true, for fourteen there was old enough to march as a squire – “but I was wounded almost immediately.”

He pulls down the shoulder of his shirt and taps blindly at the long-healed scar there. In reality – a remnant of a nasty hunting accident, where Uncle’s arrow had gone wide, and Auguste remembers the panic over it, Father slinging him over his saddle and riding breakneck to the palace. He had been twelve, Mother carrying Laurent through the last weeks of a difficult pregnancy, and father had kept it from her for fear that the shock would trigger another miscarriage. Uncle had left as ambassador to Kempt not long after, too ashamed to look at Auguste. The accident had weighed heavily on him, and Auguste had felt so guilty for worrying everyone so, begged Uncle to stay. He hadn’t.

“A fever took hold” – he fumbles. “It is not clear – I remember it was thought strange that we were there. But my Father and I had been halfway back from a trip to Patras and my father – he had said we should be there, that to pass it by was – dishonourable.”

Auguste had hoped for such a showing, not three weeks past. But every herald sent swiftly to Kempt by sea had returned half starved, not even permitted to dock – every bird fluttered in, cooing, explicitly without reply.

“I remember,” he said, slowly, “that the sea voyage was so rough that I never went by boat again. But the fever swallowed everything else. As it swallows Vere now.” He smiles, weakly.

He does not expect the fat tear that slides down Paschal’s cheek, into his beard.

“Pallas is right. Aleron does not rule,” Paschal said quietly. He takes a deep breath and chuckles hoarsely. “I apologise for weeping. There were many years one could not, for fear, for shame. The prince – the older prince – the other Auguste – was killed on the front.”

He is dead, then. He thinks he takes it with equanimity, all things considered, but it is such a strange feeling that he can barely focus when Paschal continues “and Aleron, the king - was killed too. He died not an hour after.”

“Oh,” says Auguste. It is – a very flat sound, even to his own ears. He thinks of Father’s hand on his shoulder, pressing a kiss to his forehead. The way he did a thousand beloved things. One breath. Another.

Auguste is technically a king now, and he may not weep. It reverberates through him. Father is dead. Father has been dead for twelve years. The fearful vision of Father signing over Laurent like a parcel of land melts away, at least. It is cold comfort. He envies Paschal.

He clears his throat. “Aleron was kind. My cousin also. My family must have mourned them.”

Paschal avoids his eyes, and nods.

“Yes,” he says. “It was worse – when. Well, your Uncle’s brother ruled as regent for some time.”

He pauses.

“It was not known, then, what he had done, you understand.”

The air in his lungs coagulates. His shoulder throbs. He thinks of six-foot walls made of sandstone; Marlas-the-impenetrable; the pointless, wretched, battle. The final thought that caught at his mind before the fall.

“What,” he asks, very steadily, “did the royal family do to itself, Paschal?”

Paschal exhales - and tells him. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Auguste, as it turns out, is not the only person in the whole world to have ever had a bad time. Who knew?

 

Pallas regards him as an oddity. This is fine.

 

_Oddity_ , to Pallas, encompasses a variety of things. It explains his confusion, his questions, that he plays Aces high even when Pallas sternly informs him that the King is obviously at the top of the pack, his - “strange stares, Kemptian!” – fixed and furious looks. Mostly, it means Pallas is happy to pass off Auguste an amusing outsider, someone foreign - “never met Kemptian before anyway, for comparison” – yet familiar – “Is not that you _look_ like King, but look more like him than anyone else, yes?” – that he can befriend, easily enough, given his nature and Auguste’s enforced bedrest. Auguste is mildly grateful, even if he is an Achelion. It’s not like there’s much else to do.

 

He is healing fast – he knows this because Paschal exclaims over it every day, says that he has healed a month’s worth in two weeks. Auguste finds it difficult to be intrigued by this. He attributes half of it to exaggeration – and the rest, well. He was exceptional when he was alive the first time and given the resurrection it seems unsurprising. Pallas is fascinated by it. He has actually started talking to Paschal about medicines and salves, and badgering Auguste about looking at his wounds properly. Paschal thinks this is charming to the extent that his complaints about Jord lessen to a rate of twice a day. Auguste, who is subject to being the medical miracle, is less enthused.

 

He feels anxious and exhausted, mostly, and as Paschal teases a bashful Pallas about apprenticeships he broods, on and off. He has never been very good at _dwelling_ , and this is certainly something one should dwell on. But Paschal was particularly attentive and careful, the days after telling him, and he told himself it was important to push away. Simply the faraway tragedy of distant relations that he had certainly heard before. But Auguste has always found it hard to feel two ways at once, and its an uneasy pretend. So he will play cards, and only think how easy it is to laugh, and deal, and ask after Paschal’s shipments and play fast while Pallas is distracted – and then when Pallas has lost and Paschal has gone in search of whatever, he is skewered, again, with grief and pain.

 

Obsessively, he recounts to himself what he has been told, what he half-knows. His father is dead. His uncle killed his father. His uncle tried to kill his brother and take the throne. His brother killed his uncle and retook the kingdom – or retook the kingdom and killed his uncle. Order is important, in terms of regicide – regenticide, rather. The glow in Auguste’s heart at the thought of Laurent, beloved and in command of a devoted army avenging their father with honour stutters and dulls when he thinks of who took it with him. He has to say this to himself over and over. His brother had not ridden in on a dapple-grey charger and swung a flashing sabre alone – Laurent had been aided by the man that killed him. There were Achelion events Paschal had described very briefly and Auguste had not really cared to listen to. Theomedes was dead, though, as dead as Aleron. Auguste could give two figs for other fathers. Theomedes had died in his bed. _But also grieving,_ he thinks, with a nauseous joy.

 

It never lasts long. Laurent had not just been aided by Damianos. He had been _married_ to him. Pallas likes his killer. Paschal likes his killer. His brother is married to his killer. It rings in his head like a bell.

 

Married, married. What does he think – it takes him time to sort the strands of the thoughts out. His uncle manipulated them all. He probably manipulated Laurent too. Laurent was vulnerable. There were some Achelion machinations. The Achelion took back his own kingdom - if he had ever really lost it - and taken advantage of a young man used to being in danger, being used. And now Auguste was back to rescue his family and save his kingdom – but his family was lost and his kingdom too.

 

Artes. It sounds like a curse.

 

-

 

Healing does take up a lot of energy, it turns out.

 

There is almost a routine. He wakes up to the sun falling through the windows, across the bed. He has a series of endless minutes with his grief. The door groans as Pallas shoves at it with his hip, inevitably slopping something onto the tray. Paschal helps him bathe, changes his dressings. He falls asleep, inevitably. He will drift awake later from strange and violent dreams; then join Pallas at the table to have a little broth. Less pain, more nausea, more dizziness. Inevitably a punch of misery will bully him awake, and then there will be time enough for cards. They will play idly, through the day, and Pallas will tell him extravagant stories about his husband or invent card games for the express purpose of beating him at them, and Paschal will write letters, sort inventories, grind dark leaves into paste, mutter darkly about tourneys and gatherings and – _oktons._

 

Paschal does _not_ approve of oktons. Pallas does not approve of oktons either, because ‘approve’ is too small a word for how he feels about “King’s game, victor’s game!”

 

“You ever ride on okton, in Kempt?”

 

“In. In the okton.” Auguste slapped his card down. “That – Pallas – is _on._ ”

 

“Oh, fucking preposition, fucking Kemptian! You never ride _in_ okton because you are _knave,_ you lack honour –“

 

Auguste has never ridden in an okton – but oh, he wanted to. Relations were never good, and truly, he wouldn’t have attended an Achelon tourney for love nor money. But maybe for glory, his wistful teenage mind had supplied, reading about it in mother’s lavishly illustrated encyclopaedia. The idea of a game you were born to or won the right to ride in… The greatest honour would be winning participation he had thought - with great scorn for any sort of rank the achelion _nobility_ could claim. There had been an embarrassingly involved daydream that occupied him for some months around the age of twelve, in which he traversed Achelios in disguise, won the right of participation, soundly thrashed Kastor - and then Theomedes – at their own game, before revealing himself as Prince Auguste to the horror of the court and the adulation of the poor, misled Achelion slaves. He’d been a bit hazy on both what the track and the royal family looked like, so he was always besting a dark haired version of his tutor on the guard’s practice ring, but every time he had won. Winning, at twelve, had also involved the tears and shame of the Achelion King, so humiliated by the loss that Auguste inevitably won the kingdom too. What a vastly superior union that would have been, he thinks, as bitter as one of Paschal’s draughts.

 

He is curious, though. Pallas brings it up again, inevitably, because there are only so many ways that Auguste can cheat at cards. He finally understands the track, because Pallas fetches quill and ink to draw the great loop of the course on paper, explains the way scale changes a ride, how an okton is only truly an okton with a king present, gory stories of childhood practice gone wrong. But Auguste doesn’t have much of an appetite for unexpected impalement currently, so asks after what he’s always wanted to know – rank or right?

 

Pallas wrinkles his nose. “Right, Auguste, of course. Second son of third son – aristocrat, not _prince._ Honestly Kemptian - _rank_.” He seems put out that Auguste might even suggest that birth had allowed him participation but pulls a blinding grin out of nowhere, focusing the teeth in all their glory on Auguste’s person. “Auguste, do you think look like a prince? Am I very gorgeous handsome and regal and thoroughbred? I am, am I not? Is my superior wit, honour at cards unlike shitstain Kemptian –“

 

“Well, maybe you would be better at cards if you spent less time _preening_ –“

 

They squabble for a bit, and then Pallas flirts lavishly for a while and Auguste corrects his grammar as he goes. Paschal leaves the room in disgust. Prepositions come up more than one might think.

 

“See, on – in. Very important, if you say you’re going to do that in them. Bit sudden, you understand?”

 

Pallas nods enthusiastically. “Husband is going to be impressed.” Auguste arches a brow. He’ll bet. Pallas beams. “He is going to fuck my brains in _.”_ Auguste considers it. It’s not egregious. Probably best to skirt the issue of what exactly the husband is going to do. Pallas is extremely proud of his extremely virile husband, and Auguste is a little baffled because Achelions were prudes, weren’t they? He says as much.

 

Rolling his eyes Pallas says, “Probably would not say in front of King or my mother, but you’re foreign.” He blushes a tiny touch, before adding defiantly “Husband might be a little coarse.”

 

Paschal re-enters the room, bearing an ominous basket of herbs, and adds “Lazar is a _lot_ coarse, Pallas. Don’t obfuscate.”

 

Pallas laughs. Directly to Auguste, he says, “Lazar is coarse, alright. But he was a mercenary! Don’t blame, all incidental. Told you I was second son. Get away with scandalous match,” raising his eyebrows. “is alright because he is hero; is alright because am second son, only reason soldier anyway – you think mother let me ride in okton if they need heirs from me?”

 

Auguste smiles blithely. “Oh, so they knew you would take part? Because your participation was decided by your…rank?”

 

He really enjoys the strangled noise Pallas makes in response and leans around the gesticulating arms to raise a particularly judicious eyebrow at Paschal. It earns him a chuckle, which is almost as entertaining as the blistering invective Pallas is aiming his way

 

“-You know what, Auguste, bet your head already messed up, shabby Kemptian fuck – Paschal, look, no fixing him, might as well tell Jord ‘oh no, fell out of window’, will do us all a favour-“ which would be more  threatening if he wasn’t miming enthusiastically defenestrating Auguste in a manner that ignored their relative bodyweights, the size of the window, and the laws of gravity. Auguste laughs for a bit too long, and then his side aches so sharply he has to be helped to bed.

 

-

 

By the time hunger draws him out of sleep the sky outside the window is dark and still. No storm tonight, then. Paschal is dozing in his chair and Pallas raises a finger to his lip – _shush_ – from his place by the bed. “Very tired,” Pallas whispers.

 

Auguste frowns. Pallas reads the _why_ there and rolls his eyes. “Because you are healing so well but the pain is so much, yes? Up through the night reading, makes disgusting medicines, worried about killing you by accident before Jord even gets back.”

 

“Comforting.”

 

“Ah, be glad he cares. Broth now. Draught later.”

 

Pallas settles a tray on the bed, and they eat together quietly.

 

The room is so still, and the extraordinary fact of his healing clamours at him, nothing to obscure it. Grief hangs over him like a pall. He is dead, and he is eating soup, and he just woke and presumably will wake again and eat soup again and still, all that time, be dead. It is absurd, abstract, devastating.

 

He would just like – to feel known again. Just for a little while. So he asks, quietly.

 

“You are a soldier, Pallas. And you must have been wounded before.”

 

There is a sympathy about Pallas’ mouth as he nods. Auguste looks away, forges ahead.

 

“Have you ever been hurt badly – or _almost_ been, and grieved it after – as if you truly had lost something?”

 

Pallas hums an affirmative. Auguste can hear the desperation in his own low voice. “Would you tell me. Would you tell me of it, please?”

 

Auguste can’t look at him again until he begins to speak, very slow and quiet. He is taking, Auguste realises, the time to be careful with his veretian.

 

“You do not want to know about battles. It is never unexpected, in a battle. What is horrible is thinking all should be well. My first proper okton, with the King. I won the right.” That’s a touch defiant. Another time, Auguste would have laughed. “There were both royals at that okton, in the middle of the campaign - when your cousin was a Prince.”

 

_Laurent, Laurent._ Auguste tries to picture him mid-campaign, a strong young man; but the image will not stick. He can only see the mind – how even at thirteen Laurent had had that gift for seeing how things could fit together - recognising the cohesion of two armies in a festival of display and exertion.

 

Auguste listens as Pallas talks of already being tired, but dizzy with joy fed back at him from the cheering crowd. The okton is dangerous – all the best things are – but Pallas is clearly here and intact. It stifles his fear. That is, until Pallas starts talking about the Prince choosing to ride.

 

“Wasn’t Damianos calling himself King by that point?”

 

Pallas looks at him quizzically. “Yes. But I am talking on other one. King Laurent was Prince Laurent.” He rolls his eyes. “Cannot tell story ‘King this King that’, far too difficult for you to follow.” He nudges Auguste teasingly, but Auguste is dumb with horror, incapacitated.

 

Laurent rode in a okton. Laurent, in an okton. Slender little Laurent, his brother, half a baby still. Auguste was never going to let him on a horse again.

 

Pallas is still talking.

 

Auguste can picture the kind of spry mount Laurent would always choose – but he can’t make the boy into a man, can’t pin him down, so in his head it is one second the spindly boy, then the compact youth – adding years just summons an image of his mother, of whom Laurent is the spit. So as Pallas speaks it is mother swinging into the saddle, cool as cast iron – “He was so calm it made me want to shit. But everyone was watching, and I rode” - and it soothes his mind a little, Hennike cornering the course with ease, fluidity. Pallas speaks mesmerisingly of how it all faded around him, and Auguste shuddered with the thought of ritualised spectacle, the single minded concentration of such moments.

 

He had just wanted a companion in his own strange fear for one moment. But Pallas goes on, and his heart in his mouth with every flung spear – even mother is flagging, now. And then as Pallas describes the mis-thrown spears, “They told me later that the King had caught mine from thin air” eyes wide at the memory, how he had been there, staring down the weapon whistling at him and knowing, completely, that he must either die or risk the loss of the allegiance, ostracism and exile: how he held the line.

 

“Auguste, I did think I would die. But how could I move?”

 

Auguste knows that he must have – but it rings in his chest that Pallas would have died for Laurent, for his own brother.

 

“I was so afraid – I didn’t want to die – I wanted to impress my own King, I wanted to swear in public and kiss the Veretian that kept whistling at me – but the Prince!”

 

He hears it all with his jaw knocked open in shock – Laurent’s leap onto the horse, saving them both, keeping him from harm _and still winning._ Mother finally melts into a young man in his head, gilded and strong.

 

“-not dying, I felt like I had! How could something like that happen? And everyone celebrated and truly, it must have been magnificent. But it was – it made me very still, very cold, remembering again and again.” Pallas’ voice is still low, but pitchy with remembered agitation. “We all dined together but I kept sweating – knowing that we would go back to fight the next day or soon after – and I could not eat, really.”

 

He smiles ruefully, at his hands knotted together on the edge of the bed.

 

“Everything I thought about myself. That I was brave hero, that because Veretians had no honour, no love or care for others, that we must be only truly good people – well, could that be right, after I had frozen, failed, been saved _by_ Veretian? It took me days to be normal again. Didn’t feel right truly until I got to kiss the whistler.” He clears his throat. “Am still a little embarrassed, truly. I hate to freeze. Not wounded in my body – but the mind lives and dies differently. Sometimes. I think.”

 

Auguste digests this. It’s not the same. How could it be the same?

 

The room is quiet, and the candles gutter.

 

Auguste, very cautiously, reaches out with an open hand - hovers for a second – and squeezes Pallas’s.

 

Perhaps it is not so wholly different.

 


	7. Chapter 7

A touch of the hand and Pallas has, essentially, become his - not in the way of subjugation or sex, thank you, Veretians did not do the former and could well restrain themselves about the latter, but - in that he had astonished himself by sharing his own pain, which outside of that moment might have been weakness or a chink in that varnished surface, and had rationalised sharing it by coming to the conclusion that Auguste was something special indeed. Auguste, quite comfortable being a leader of men, found an Achelion ally made his stomach twist up uncomfortably. It was easy for the lines to blur, wasn't it, Laurent?

 

Maybe it had been as lonely when he had been dead as it was waking up. Laurent had been used to being loved; he himself was used to being admired. Longing for familiarity was enough to have him teasing Pallas like a friend, hurting for him - like a brother might.

 

It did not make him stop cheating at cards. That would be a bridge too far.

 

-

 

High summer in the south is awful. The heat is blistering against the skin and sucking and wet in the shade; at night, deafening thunderstorms crawl down the country to the sea. Marlas is - _was_ \- _is_ \- always empty through these long hot months. It's an autumn fortress, really, for chasing the lean bucks and sweet-eyed does; or a base from which to ride out to the east, and make merry sport bringing down the red throated birds and fat spackled rock-hens. But summer sees the court abandon even Arles, push north into the edges of forests or east to the foothills, splintering off into indolent groups and abandoning fashion until the heat recedes, just a little.

 

Summer is, Auguste mourns, for being outside - lying in the shadow of the white birch, leaping naked into cool rivers, scrambling up trees and swapping lazy kisses in the balmy evenings. It is not, he decides, for an inconvenient and painful flush of infection on top of a gutting wound and feigned amnesia.

 

"If only," Paschal laments, "Jord had brought me what I asked for, then I am certain that the last round of pastes would have soothed this." He moves his hand in such a way that Auguste has to grit his teeth to keep from making an extremely un-princely noise.

 

Pallas peers over the good doctor's shoulder. Auguste knows the infected area is not festering, but truly, he has seen enough of his own interior recently that second hand reports will do just fine. Pallas makes a face, angles his head closer and makes a different, equally disgusted face. He glances up to catch Auguste's eye and shakes his head, just a little. Not good, then. Auguste was already so fucking warm - he had hardly thought that a fever could build on top of that. But things he had hardly thought were possible had been happening with some frequency recently, hadn't they?

 

He fades into sleep with Pallas worriedly querying the colour of the wound.

 

-

 

There are series of horrible hazy days where they seem to be constantly cleaning and pressing things - compresses - whatever, at the aching spot on his side, where whenever he opens his eyes Pallas is hovering with a cool cloth and Paschal keeping up a steady stream of low, critical conversation. It is hot throughout it all, and Auguste dreams of breezes, grass, the outsides of a single room in a newly foreign space.

 

-

 

When he comes round, it is to a fresh set of stitches in his side for Paschal to fret over, a gleam of worry lurking in Pallas’ eyes, and the absolute conviction that he must go outside, and soon.

 

This is easier decided than done.

 

“No,” Paschal says. “I absolutely cannot countenance it, Auguste, even with the way you heal - one insect bite and I’ll have wasted half a summer’s willow on a dead man.”

 

Even Pallas, conciliatory and concerned, squirms with the need to evade the question when Auguste puts it to him.

 

“Oh, Kemptian. Paschal said not right now, didn’t he? I want to learn more and he will be so angry if I don’t listen to him that maybe he won’t teach me - and then what if you take a fever again, yes?”

 

Auguste grunts. Pallas takes this for resignation and beams at him. “See? Best to stay indoors, for now. Teach me that Kemptian game with the rounds?”

 

And that is that, to them. He plays cards and drinks what he is told; he does not go outside.

 

So he sits in bed, and watches the sun and the storms cycle past the windows. Some days there is a stringed instrument, not quite a lute, being played in the courtyard and sometimes cheerful shouting. But mostly it is quiet, quiet and hot. Why is the castle so empty? Marlas always has a skeleton garrison - why, that’s vital, given its location.

 

Ah. It probably lacks the strategic value it once did. What with _Artes_. Still.

 

One particularly hot day, Paschal has left the room and he has taken the opportunity to slide down onto the cool stone floor, and lie on his back next to where Pallas is sprawled, writing letters in his chickenscratch achelion.

 

“Why is the castle so empty?”

 

“Oh, the garrisons are in Vask with the King,” Pallas says idly – “Or to Ithisma, with Damianos-exalted.” There’s a beat, and then he bolts upright – “not a spy, Kemptian? Truly, promise.”

 

Auguste laughs - “Not a spy!” - and stores away the information for later.

 

-

 

He has asked, and asking again seems - well. Churlish? For all that this is an inverted and traitorous version of his own kingdom, where he is no longer technically a prince - he still grew up a prince, with all that entailed. Rooms are rarely barred for princes – they understand where they can go and where they cannot. A name has been like a key for almost all of his life; here, not so much. Given that he had made clear that he wanted to go out, he had just assumed that one day Paschal would suggest it eventually, but he doesn’t. Auguste feels – awkward. It is a new feeling.

 

He can show, rather than tell, surely? So he hangs half out the window, looking for the lute player - “it is a _kithara_ , Auguste!” - or a breeze or truly, even for a familiar face. When the fever took him the second time he had dreamed of his friends, his cohort, his many cousins. He had dreamed abstractly of Orlant besting him in ring; Geraint laughing at him tipped arse over elbow; the Lady Vannes whistling lewdly from a high window. The fever had laid his memories thickly over each other with a paste of longing - but some of them must still live, surely. He wonders if they would recognise him. But he sees no-one, and all his be-windowed exploits do is prompt vociferous chiding from Paschal over his new stitches.

 

Auguste, eventually, breaks. He - there is no other word for it - whinges to Pallas.

 

“But why not?”

 

“Because, as said many times! It will make you sick!”

 

“Well, I don’t think-”

 

Pallas whips his head round to glare at him. “It is no good, Auguste. Paschal will not agree to have you out in the gardens. Will you not play cards, be peaceful?”

 

“But Pallas -”

 

Pallas flops his head into his hands and shrieks into them. “No! No more! I know you want to fucking go the fuck outside but Paschal will not agree and Jord! Said! It was not to happen!”

 

Well, that’s new. Auguste stills. “Jord? Jord said?”

 

“Ah, sheepshit. Forget that for me, please, Kemptian?”

 

“No.” Auguste says mulishly, and reaches over to poke him in the cheek.

 

Pallas doesn’t even bother to swat it away. “Ugh, Auguste, I do not know! He is a bullish man, my commander, and he said it was safer for you to only speak to us - and Thais to nurse you, but your sensibilities - well, you don’t see her.” That must have been the serving girl those first few days, he supposed.

 

“But Pallas, who is going to hurt me? You said yourself it was an almost empty castle.” Unless… “Unless Jord thinks I am the threat.” It stings to say it.

 

Pallas snorts a laugh. “Oh, as if. Fine! I think it is stupid also - I will ask Paschal. Now will you rest?”

 

-

 

When it comes down to it, he corners Paschal after that evening’s meal, and overrules Paschal’s panicked murmurs about infection and fever and the sluggish air in the meadows and gardens. Auguste argues for the early mornings, the clearing storms. Paschal breathes deeply through his nostrils and goes to argue quietly with Pallas outside the door. Auguste lurches himself over to it and, without shame, presses his ear to the keyhole to listen in.

 

-

 

Pallas had seemed to enjoy being Auguste’s hero for roughly fifteen minutes, before they both realised that Paschal was right, Auguste was still very weak, and that they were both too proud to admit these things and turn back.

 

They eventually made it downstairs. Admittedly, with Pallas taking the majority of his body weight and Auguste’s vision greyed out around the edges and his breath sticky in his lungs - Pallas hissing at him that he was slug, that if he passed out now Paschal would kill them both but it would last longer for Pallas, hadn’t he ever heard of honour or brotherhood - but down those endless flights nonetheless.

 

And then Pallas shunted the door open with his hip and - oh. The gardens.

 

They look out over the old battlefield in the tower room, so Auguste has not seen these before. Gardens in the old Veretian style, intertwining lawn with flower and hedge - but eschewing the decorative trellising of Arles for features like low marble benches - _a la Achelos_ , he thinks wretchedly - and clever water features that must be piped up, burbling away. The scent! The room is clean and fresh, but it doesn’t have this - this enveloping fragrance. The smell fills him up, clears his vision, focuses him. He drinks it in as they lurch forwards; spikes of blushing nerium, clouds of sweet osmanthus, white honeysuckle curlicueing up into the blue, blue sky and, underpinning it all, the pale flowers of the cistus drifting on their evergreen shrubs. He remembers, with a hard swallow, sitting at Mother’s feet as she and her ladies stripped the leaves from those stems so as to distill them for rich, resinous perfumes.

 

Maybe coming outside was a mistake.

 

Pallas deposits him on a stretch of grass probably slightly harder than he needs to, expelling the air from Auguste’s lungs with an _oof_. It’s actually quite clearing, but Pallas blanches, and immediately grabs at his face, turning him this way and that - “Auguste, I am sorry, did I hurt you? Are - are you weeping?”

 

Auguste may have been about to cry, but it has nothing to do with being dropped like a sack of potatoes. Mostly. There’s a twinge in his tailbone that says differently.

 

“No, obviously not,” he huffs. “But if you wanted to apologise, you could always get me some water.” Pallas nods enthusiastically, and goes off to do just that. Auguste flops back on the grass with a sigh. He’s not really thirsty, but to be alone, outside, is a pleasure. And the sadness, too - well, cistus would have made him weep in the other Marlas too. Mother was already gone by then. It is almost refreshing to feel a sadness he had already come to terms with.

 

The fragrance and the sun and the grass under his fingers lets him drift, pleasantly, for a while. He feels drowsy but restful for once, and if Pallas is taking a while with the water, well. There’s a clatter somewhere behind him at some point, but Auguste’s head is feeling comfortable flopped where it is, and there is a distractingly large bee that is bumbling from stem to stem in a pleasing fashion.

 

It’s actually only when the bee has had its fill and gone on its way that Auguste really feels the sweat on his brow. Where _is_ Pallas?

 

He heaves himself over to flop on his front and squints.

 

Well, that explains the clatter. There is an abused looking pitcher on the ground by the wall, upon which Pallas is hitched up, being kissed and groped with equal vigor. Pallas starts to giggle when the kissing moves to his neck and the hand apparently moves to a more interesting location.

 

Auguste has seen the court in the high spring and he refuses to be embarrassed.

He only interrupts when the groping turns into groaning and proprietary squeezes, but he does do it with a wolf-whistle, just because.

Pallas must hear him because he sort of extricates a limb and taps at the shoulder flush with his until the other man consents to leave him – with another wet smacking kiss and something that Auguste can’t see that makes Pallas squeak.

 

Lazar is not as tall as Pallas made him seem – he actually thinks Pallas is taller – and has the tilting, wolfish grin of a man who intends to return to what he was doing very soon. That sort of drops off his face when he sees Auguste though. He squints a bit at him. He turns back to Pallas and whispers something.

 

Responding, Pallas shakes his head with another giggle - and smoothes out his chiton, moving towards Auguste, dragging Lazar by the hand.

 

“You must be the husband,” he calls, drily.

 

Lazar smiles with all of his teeth showing. Pallas rolls his eyes. Gesturing widely at Auguste, he says, “Auguste, Lazar, Lazar, Auguste. Auguste, first thing he asks - Has the King broken his nose?” Auguste, who feels sun-stupid and lazy enough not to respond verbally, rolls onto his back with mock indignation. But he does laugh.

 

“Second cousin, messed up head, Kempt,” Pallas ticks off his fingers to Lazar - to Auguste, he says directly and with great cheer, “too ugly to be King!”

 

“As you have said!” replies Auguste.

 

Pallas throws himself down beside him and says something in very slow measured achelion to Lazar. The teeth get flashed at the end too, which distracts Lazar from Pallas grabbing his belt and hauling him off his feet. There is some tussling, which Auguste is charmed by.

 

Introductions made and niceties done with, the late morning settles around them. Auguste is struck by the contradictions that have come with dying - but it is simply too warm to dwell.

 

Public affection was a pleasant part of Auguste’s youth, and this could almost be an afternoon in Arles-that-was in Vere-that-was. Lazar, of Ver-Vassel and salt-lard fame, has a number of sweet nothings to mutter to Pallas that put any curiosity about the blonde stranger on the backburner. Furthermore, he also has a couple of dice tucked in his pocket - so they bet idly while he talks about the storms and the ride back to Marlas and taunts Pallas over the – big fat dirty mushrooms under the trees that taste like nothing else – _truffles_ , Auguste helpfully supplies – that they have taken to slicing fat chunks off and packing in oil, and how these had been eaten over salt-lard on the pale, flattened bread they had in the tribes – but toasted. Pallas had wailed with envy and Lazar smothered him with kisses – announcing, of course – of course! – that such a stoppered jar was packed into Lazar’s saddlebag. Auguste thought Pallas was going to cry, and there was a stream of achelion he didn’t understand – apart from the words for _‘fortune’_ and _‘favoured’_ – but the flashing teeth were translation enough.

 

This is the sort of marriage he had hoped for himself one day, tentatively. A wife he could laugh with. Mother and Father had a complex, intricate humour between them fed by a web of language and gesture that Auguste could never be a part of – but had been amazed to watch and wonder at love despite politics, before Mother had become too caught up in sadness and sickness for either. Even shy, fretful Laurent had said in a rare moment of longing (rare, of course, because a beloved prince rarely needed to long) that he hoped he might find his husband funny. That they would make him smile, like Mother smiled, like something glorious was cradled in her hands. Would - there’s the punch. He should have expected it.

 

Laurent would not get to laugh like this because he was under the thumb of a murderer. In a marriage like that, there were surely only _should_ and _must_. When fear was the bedrock, there was no place for intricacy. Laurent’s hopes; his heart hurt for them, here where language was bleeding into something else, where gesture was different, impenetrably Achelion.

 

-

 

That was the thing, in the end, that brought his weakness back. With the sun getting to its peak, Lazar and Pallas helped him inside, between them. He was Artes, he thought, with a burst of absurd humour as he lay down to sleep, all the way up the stairs. Suspended between Achelos and Vere - in the middle of a marriage.

 

-

 

He sleeps through until the next morning, deep and dreamless. The last vestige of fever has left him, he thinks with a clarity that has been lacking in recent days. Enough, at least, that by the time Pallas appears with the tray he is actually hungry, and determined to eat at the table rather than in bed. Pallas seems somewhat subdued. He’s strong enough to feed himself, so it isn’t inconvenient, just - worrying. He makes a lewd comment about the night before, but gets only the ghost of a laugh in return.

 

He frowns. “What’s ailing you, Pallas? Are you well?”

 

Pallas won’t really look at him. “Nothing,” he mutters. “Ravens came this morning, is all.”

 

Auguste puts two and two together. “Paschal wound himself into a fury already, then?” Poor Pallas. It’s not like he can bring back Jord or the wretched convoy any quicker.

 

Pallas chokes on a laugh that sounds a little more like a sob. Pushes back the bench and paces. “Something like that.”

 

Auguste sets down his spoon with a frown - and that is when Paschal walks in. Auguste gestures worriedly at Pallas’ back. Paschal looks no happier, however. What was this - Could it be the raven - could it be that something had been attacked? That convoy? Something worse -

 

“ _Laurent_ , King Laurent. Is he well? What is wrong?” It is wrenched from him, the question. He is half out of his seat before he has finished speaking. Paschal doesn’t even respond. Lazar slips through the door behind him; closes it firmly.

 

There is a beat. It is a strange, complex silence.

 

Paschal breaks it.

 

“Why are you here, Auguste?” It is asked very calmly, very slowly.

 

The thing is, the day before had been so warm and pleasant, his sleep so long and calming, that Auguste actually believes his own confusion.

 

“What do you mean? I don’t remember, you know that.”

 

Paschal turns to glance at Lazar, who steps forward. He has something in his hand - he slams it onto the tabletop.

 

Lazar speaks up. “Did you think no-one would send word to Kempt? Do you really think us so slow?”

 

It is a scroll, unspooling, the sort of thing you can attach to the leg of a raven. The writing is cramped but what he sees is - _not of that name, Kempt has no dealings nor wishes them with Vere or Artes -_ Ah.

 

"There has been hope for a herald from Kempt for some time," Paschal said, quietly.

 

Auguste knew this was never going to last. He had not wished it to. But it had been a balm in its own way - and now -

 

“Could I not be that herald? You think every family in Kempt has the same hopes as mine?”

 

Paschal looks at him. It skewers his bluff. “I do not think that every royal cousin in Kempt does, no. But I doubt they - or their hopes - are yours.” For all that Paschal is a silly older man in a foolish hat, he has a sense to him when he says something important that he has been waiting to say it for some time, and he will keep going steadily until he has done, that his being heard is an inorexable fact.

 

“So I ask again. Why are you here, Auguste?”

 

It isn’t really a lie, actually - “I don’t _know_! I have told you!”

 

“Auguste.” it is Pallas that speaks - half reaches for him. “Tell him you didn’t lie, Auguste.”

 

"What do you want from me?" Snarling, rounding on Pallas, who is looking at him with wet, wounded eyes. Lazar, behind him, hand on the hilt of his sword. The betrayal of another Veretian clawed at him. To them, he was the traitor. He feels like screaming.

 

Paschal continues, relentless. “I want the truth, Auguste. I seek an explanation, in return for your healing, our care. I do not wish us to be played for fools.”

 

There is a chill line of sweat beading down Auguste’s spine.

 

“What explanation would you have me give?” His voice is rasping, broken.

 

“One that could explain this, perhaps.” Paschal pulls from the deep pockets of his doctor’s apron a fluttering, sky blue piece of silk. It is finely worked, but torn. Auguste recognises it. What kind of warrior would not know his own tabard - what prince is not moved by the sight of his own sigil? “Jord entrusted it to me when he left. You truly thought that lanolin and tourneys were the real concerns of our correspondence?”

 

His hearts slows - he would swear it almost still in his chest. “Tell me who you are, Auguste. Tell me where you hail from. Tell me why you are here.”

 

He feels like a cornered animal. Paschal looks at him. Pallas does not. Which is worse?

 

“You would not believe me,” is, finally, what cracks from his throat.

 

Paschal inclines his head. “I have believed many things I once thought impossible. I have discovered unknowable things about men I thought I knew as I did myself. I have seen trees grow back on salted earth, and wounds heal when they should not. ”

 

Auguste shakes his pounding head. “Not like this.”

 

Meditatively, Paschal speaks. “I am not an imaginative man. I have spent more than many of my allotted years fretting on the doings of kings. You think I did not see Aleron and Auguste everywhere for years? What was another half-glimpsed face?” He pauses, and his final words are heavy, as heavy as lead. “But - if you do not speak, then I will say it for you.”

 

The silence is too long, too loud. There is disappointment in Paschal’s eyes as Auguste remains silent. He moves as if to speak.

 

No. Auguste has lost his life, his land, the love of too many dear people to count. He will have his name. His breath may be ragged, but he will be the one to say it. It is expelled as a gasp, in truth.

 

“I was born,” he shudders. “In the solarium of the palace of Arles - ” Paschal nods.

 

“And I died - “ Pallas snaps his head up, and on his lovely face something horrible dawns. “ - on the fields of Marlas.”

 

“My blood is that of Hennike of Kempt, of Aleron of Vere. Your exalted Damianos spilt it in my twenty-fifth year, and watered the ground with it.”

 

Hate surges up through him. He curls his lip, and thinks of what has been done to him, without him.

 

“That cur bled me like a pig and bedded the last of my line. My name is Auguste, Crown Prince of Vere, and I can only assume -”

 

He snarls it as he says it, feels the twist of his face -

 

“That I am _here_ for revenge.”

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the break in updates! 
> 
> Three important things:
> 
> 1\. Crostini con tartufo e lardo di colonnata: this is the real-world equivalent of toasted flatbread with Vaskian salt lard and big fat dirty mushrooms. This dish is the entire reason Pallas and Lazar are in this fic. I don't know, but they felt the most likely to discuss gorgeous cured fat in a lusty way. I am an evangelist for this dish; it is so fucking tasty, you guys. Neck fat forever. 
> 
> 2\. Plants. Gardens. Fragrant flowering shrubs. I LOVE THEM!
> 
> 3\. You know that bit in book 3 where Damen is like "all Veretians are awful perverts" and Laurent said (essentially) "no, my Uncle's court is full of awful perverts"; one of my favourite lines. Vere must have been so different, before the Regent! I mean, I don't think "people that raised Laurent and Auguste" and then follow that up with "definitely on board with gladitorial rape matches". Rather, I love the thought of a Vere where everyone is just so into PDA that Auguste genuinely thinks of Lazar and Pallas as low-key. Auguste's only rule is that unknown women do NOT see your hindquarters without a chaperone in private. At social events, like simultaneous yet carefully seperate orgies, it's totally fine!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the gap in updates! I was going to say it was too hot to write, then too cold - but it was laziness. Sorry again for almost lying to you! OTOH, I have now plotted large parts of the story, so that's a bonus. 
> 
> Short update today, with more to follow soon.
> 
> Chapter 8, AKA: Auguste has a tantrum, pt 1.

 

 

“So. You’re going to kill the King?”

 

Auguste bares his teeth. “Yes.”

 

Lazar, cleaning under his nails with a little dagger, pauses for a moment as if to consider, then inclines his head in understanding. “Right, right. I mean, I like the man, but he didn’t kill me.”

 

Auguste makes a noise of bafflement and frustration. __Obviously.__  

 

He starts picking at his nails again. The dagger bounces a light up onto the ceiling of the room.

 

“Or,” Lazar adds, “Fuck my brother.”

 

Oblivious to or - more likely - uncaring of the expression Auguste __knows__  he is making, he continues “Well, I don’t know. I haven’t seen Berel for a while. Certainly didn’t marry him, though. Must sting a bit. For you, not Berel.”

 

Auguste stares. Lazar looks up and smiles at him. If Auguste were an idiot, he might believe it to be consoling.

 

“So you do have a relevant motive, I guess. What with the -” He mimes a slashing motion.

 

“Yes,” Auguste grits out. “What with the stabbing.”

 

The serving girl - __Thais__  - ostensibly scrubbing the floor, lets out a strangled snort. Her shoulders are shaking.

 

Lazar notices too. “Oi Thais, that you done? Right.”

 

He nods at Auguste and swings up off the bench. “Time to go. I’ve got a husband to woo.” Ushering Thais out the door, he calls back over his shoulder “Never would’ve seen myself as a chaperone - but needs must!”

 

The door hits the frame with a dull and reverberating thud. It catches Auguste at the back of his teeth. Pallas wouldn’t have - he catches the thought before it can end. Pallas absolutely would have slammed the door, because he was a careless young man on top of being the enemy, and Auguste should be glad of the opportunity to remember that!

 

It was a bitter and uneasy understanding, the knowledge that he was not. He was mostly just even lonelier. The grief had longer stretches to sit on his chest, undisturbed. Pallas wouldn’t nurse him and certainly wouldn’t play cards with him and whilst Auguste knew he did stand guard outside the door - he did not pass the threshold.

 

Thais had been brought back to clean with Lazar as their chaperone.It was different from Pallas. She kept her eyes to the task at hand, and Lazar was both quieter and shrewder than Auguste had expected. She even helped Paschal change his dressings and clean his wounds - so not only had he betrayed Pallas’ trust, he had ripped his new interest, his half-apprenticeship, from him too.

 

Magnificent. Truly kingly. Maybe being dead had been better - but he couldn’t think like that.

 

He had been brought back for a reason. Laurent needed him.

 

He clutched that talisman to his chest and slept, for want of anything better to do.

 

-

 

And - and, he is under house arrest again.

 

“No,” Paschal says, implacable. Auguste sagged, hand already outstretched to unlatch the casement. “And don’t think I missed Lazar telling you no earlier, either.” He eyeballs the still-raised arm until Auguste lowers it, sulkily.

 

“Thankyou. Your Highness.” It feels tacked on.

 

It was probably intentional - Paschal has had a preternatural calm around him since Auguste’s identity as revealed, and anyway, no-one weaponised titles like a doctor. Efric, his mother’s physician, had caught him pulling at his stitches while he was recovering from the puncturing arrow wound and - in full view of his parents - delivered such a blistering put down, incorporating not only his honourary Kemptian titles but his provinces that he had flinched at the mention of Acquitart for a sixmonth.

 

He tries again the next day, champing at the bit, mad with boredom. “Just to sit at open would be enough. If I kept my body inside-”

 

“No.”

 

“But why?”

 

Paschal __tchs__  under his breath. “You’re healing more slowly now, and as you’ve seen, infection is more of a concern. Half a summer’s willow. A dead man. I have said.”

 

Irritation flares up like a fever in his chest. “As if __Vere__  has ever wanted for willow,” he mutters. It grows like the blazes - they export lots of it.

 

“ _ _Artes__ , however, does. Either way, no.”

 

Fuck this new country and it’s stuffy rooms and its lack of medicine and it’s patronising, parochial doctors. “Let me sit at the casement, let me go outside, man! I can’t kill your King if he’s not even here!” He snarls. “I outrank you. Let me go __outside.__ I am your Prince!”

 

Paschal looks at him very blankly, picking up his hat and fixing it on his head. The anger is still roiling in him. Paschal says, with magnanimous grace, “a Prince?”

 

“ _ _Yes!”__

__

“Really,” Paschal says. “Of where?”

 

The door scuffs closed quietly as he leaves. Auguste gapes at it. He thinks, dazedly, that Efric would be proud.

 

-

 

Nobody’s prince of nobody’s kingdom. That’s his lot, is it? Well, if he’s neither, then he’ll act like it. He wants to be with the green and growing things, just for the fact they’re both living.

 

Paschal has been perfunctory with him since the set down. Auguste is determined to have it work in his favour.

 

There’s a crutch under the bed, from before the second fever, when he was allowed more time on his feet. He’s going to get outside under his own steam. He commanded armies, for crying out loud. He can manage stairs.

 

-

 

Armies are all hot air. Stairs are wicked and unnatural and out of place in any civilised dwelling. He has been defeated by the west staircase and its spiral staircase, but he knows the eastern is more forgiving. If only he could remember how to get there. Being dead plays havoc on your internal compass, apparently.

 

Rounding the corner, he recognises his location. In this corridor, there are bright stripes of red in the buff sandstone - iron ore. It did double duty for the memory of the King that had installed it, his tutor had said; symbolically, a reminder of military might, their capability with metal and artistically just - nice to look at. The Achelions might have tried to scrub away any trace of gaiety, but even they had to acquiesce to mineral deposits.

 

Speaking of acquiescing - there is an Achelion, suffering to have a had at his shoulder, another at his waist, in such a gaudy location. Not ten paces away is the back of Pallas’ head, curved into Lazar’s neck. And the rest of them, of course, clutched together against the wall.

 

Pallas has his back to him, but his shoulders heave with distress. His voice is reedy, thinner than usual, keening in his broken veretian at such a pitch that it carries. It is with a jolt that Auguste realises Pallas is talking about him. _Who knows what he is _,__  Pallas sobs.

 

Not who but what - what he is. It’s curious. The pain of hearing it is almost numbing. He had thought he was used to being known, that he wanted to return to what everything was before. Maybe he doesn’t like being known. Maybe it was nice to be Auguste from Kempt, rather than Auguste of Vere, if only for a little while.

 

_“A shadow from the dark, a curse, a walking evil eye-”_

 

Weren’t Achelions supposed be practical, without superstition?

 

As if in reply, Lazar’s head snaps up and looks straight at him. He raises an eyebrow.

 

Auguste turns on his good heel - and flees without stopping to enquire.

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tantrum 2: full throttle

 

 

_A shadow in the dark. A walking evil eye._  

 

It’s not him that’s the evil eye, Auguste thinks. Lazar’s steady gaze bores into his back even now, after a restless and guilty sleep. His little adventure did nothing for his side, either. There’s a throb that curls into his gut more fiercely than it had before, and a queasy purple tinge to his skin.

 

Auguste wonders where Lazar is from, with his witch-eyes and steady gaze. What he might have said to Pallas to make him think such things.

__

__A curse._ _

 

As if Pallas could have thought such things himself - the Achelions are too shallow for superstition, he knows. But __does__  he know? Kemptians, they were half-cut on curses and the evil eye. That was their character, curled up as they were in fjords and forests, the kind of folk that’d sell their own mothers for fear of their shadows. Vere took the sensible stance of keeping an eye on ill omens, avoiding the wretchedness of bastardry, paying dues and libations to the Spring. The Achelions might go for a ghost, once in a blue moon, but even then - let them spring gibbering from the earth three times and that would be the end of them.

 

It was a thing in Patras to make jokes about it, the Ellosean countries and their sliding scale of suspicion. __A Kemptian, a Veretian and an Achelion walk into a haunted house…__ That was a joke the young king of Patras had once tried to tell mother. She had not appreciated it.

 

Maybe Lazar has the same Kemptian blood in him as mother had. He doubted it. There’s a jut to his forehead that had the look of a Ladehors fisherman about it, the thousand-step-stare of a man looking out for the horizon - Auguste was good at placing people. Even mercenaries. Fisher-born it was. Just a superstitious sword-for-sale with a big mouth and a gullible spouse.

__

__Gullible__. Oh - he’s ashamed of himself, for having thought that. What a thing to think about a fr-

 

Well. What a thing to think.

 

-

 

Even the glimpse of Pallas’ shadow outside the door as Lazar swing gaily in with Thais and her tray that afternoon sets his gut roiling with complicated and useless feelings.

 

Lazar must intercept it, because he makes a show of wincing. Auguste shoots him a poisonous glare which draws only a snort in response, and, then, a reassurance, delivered mildly. “He didn’t see you.”

 

Is that meant to be a comfort? The problem is, Auguste isn’t sure if he __didn’t__ want to be seen. That old, beloved known-ness of being seen for who he was. Even if what he was was a shadow of a man that had died on the curves of the meadow beyond the walls of the keep. Even then.

 

“You did though. Didn’t you?”

 

Lazar blinks at him. Auguste knows he understands the question.

 

He doesn’t mean the corridor. He means - last week, in the gardens. The startle on Lazar’s face. Recognition. His own acceptance of joke that made no sense given the man’s position in the Kingsguard - a slip that Laurent never would have missed.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Before - when I lived? The first time?”

 

Lazar’s laughter has a sharp edge to it and Auguste bristles. He forces a breath out - listen, listen. It wasn’t unkindly meant, if Lazar’s ease is anything to go by. He kicks back on the bench with a low whistle. “How old do you think I am? It’s not me that’s a member of the undead. Think that legion has a cohort of one.”

 

Auguste can hardly help the incredulous look. Lazar smirks.

 

“No, I mean, a mercenary doesn’t tend to have a long and fruitful career, does he? Didn’t come to Artes until you were long buried, milord.” He sketches a half-bow. It is not respectful. “No, being ten years your junior,” this is delivered with a wink, “back then I was elsewhere. I grew up in -”

 

“Ladehors.”

 

Lazar cocks an eyebrow at him, more amused than wary. “Well. Yes. How did you know that? I know for a fact Pallas didn’t tell you-”

 

Auguste finishes the sentence for them both. “-because he can’t pronounce it.”

 

“Yes! Though it’s not like I can make those Akelion sounds either. All those consonants.” Lazar makes a buzzing sound against the soft palate of his mouth that Auguste surmises is an attempt at saying __Isthma__.

 

Its conciliatory, the show of incompetence. A fit of gratefulness overtakes Auguste and he says, quickly, “I thought it was Ladehors because of the forehead. And the long stare.” Lazar guffaws. “Ah, the Ladehors face! I escaped the worst of it. Poor Berel though. You look at him and you can tell we only have five sets of great-grandparents.”

 

Auguste snorts. “Well. Me too. Mother told me herself, she said your Father had to marry me or you’d have been born with webbed feet -”

 

“Maybe that’s what they were aiming for, back home. Would have been handy with the catch, you know?”

 

“How utile. It does make me wonder what my ancestors were hoping for. Marine warfare?”

 

Lazar grins. “Guess there’s time enough. Specially now we know death doesn’t exactly stick to your lot.”

 

Auguste wants to smile back, for this to be easy. But it’s too simple, this lightness. Isn’t that who he was before? Before death slipped off him like a borrowed cloak. Instead he says -

 

“You’re not afraid.” It’s more petulant than he intended. But Pallas! Pallas’ fear.

 

He looks up, and Lazar’s gaze is fixed on him. He says, as if still mulling it over - “People were afraid of Akelions here, weren’t they? Not being afraid set me in pretty good stead.”

 

Indeed.

 

“And”, he adds with good humour, “I’m observant enough to know that I’m stronger than you. Ghost or no ghost.”

 

Auguste looks at him appraisingly. “Currently.” __Perhaps.__ “But not even a bit superstitious?”

 

Lazar ducks his head with a snort. “Nothing to do with me. Pallas took to that like a duck to water. That’s the Northerners in the guard got him onto that. Very stifling upbringing that they get in Akelios, aristos. Just waiting for someone to shake them loose a little.” He winks lavishly.

 

Ignoring it resolutely, Auguste carries on. “So you’re observant enough to know who I am. Who I was. But not enough to share it with your husband?” It’s more bitter than it needed to be.

 

Lazar smiles. “Pallas is handsome and noble and extremely likeable. Pallas has never had to be suspicious to survive.”

 

Right. The sort of person that gains your trust easily, and is too honourable to exploit it. It wouldn’t even occur to him. The sort of person that never had to keep an eye on his back because everyone would gladly do it for him. There’s a blindness there that Auguste doesn’t want to recognise.

 

Lazar sees the understanding in his face. “He wouldn’t have done well in Arles, you know? I was one of the regent’s men for a half decade.”

 

That sets his hackles on edge. He knew Lazar for a mercenary, of course, because the mention of it made Pallas wriggle, pleased with scandal, but he had forgotten the mechanics of it. He’s never been good at piecing things together like that, like: Lazar was a mercenary, Lazar was a mercenary at Arles, Lazar worked for ———. It was an unquestioned blank that had now been uneasily filled by his father’s usurper. The man who had allowed his brother to be abused and trapped by a murderer.

 

“I had to be good at seeing things, in a court like that -“

 

Even Father's’ court had its vipers. He wonders, abstractly, what new snakes his uncle had set amongst the lords and ladies.

 

“- and so I used to spy on the Prince.” He clarifies, nonchalantly, “your brother.”

 

Auguste sees red. “You what.”

 

 

 

Laurent, served now by men who could be bought, who had been bought before, who were glad to serve his enemies. It __incenses__  him.

 

He thrashes towards Lazar, his mind full of Laurent, alone, his own countrymen turned against him - what good loyalty now, if it was rooted in treachery, born in mercenary ambition, wickedness -

 

He is shouting it at Lazar, the sellsword bastard, who has not recoiled but sprung towards him, grasping at his hands, stopping them as they claw at him ineffectually.

 

Auguste lands a hit not with his hands but his head, hurling his body forward and slamming his forehead into Lazar’s with a resounding crack. Lazar reels back with a shouted curse. Auguste can taste blood in his mouth, feels the hot trickle of it in his nose.

 

“Fuck! What are you, a harbour thug?”

 

Auguste grins at him - or, more accurately, bares his bloody teeth. He feels dizzy.

 

“How did you think I broke my nose?”

 

He can feel himself swaying as his says it, but he can do it again. Lazar hasn’t even let go of his hands. That’s the only counterweight he needs.

 

He doesn’t get the chance. A strong hand on either shoulder pushes him back, pinning him to the bed. Weak, dizzy and still, truly, in pain - as soon as he’s down he is overpowered with embarrassing ease.  Panting, he regains his senses somewhat. Thais, silent Thais, is the one holding him. There’s a grim furrow between her brows but. She’s pretty, he notices, with the sort of dazed panic that accompanies any sort of prolonged skin on skin contact with a woman.

 

“Stop”, she says. “You are going to hurt yourself.”

 

He tries to breath past the rage in his chest, the knot in his throat, the blood in his mouth; the overwhelming absolute grief. A world where Laurent was spied upon in his own __home__  by his own __King.__ He needs to be calm. Kings are calm. He tries to focus on her voice. __Vaskian__ , that’s the accent. Southern borders, with those flattened vowels. She’s right. His side does hurt.

 

“Auguste”, Lazar says. He takes a deep breath - through his mouth, Auguste notes with satisfaction. “Your fat fucking head is made of lead, or possibly granite, but I’m not your enemy.”

 

No, because nobody has paid him to be it yet. So much for calm.

 

Auguste spits. The blood and spittle spatter on Thais’ shoulder, glob on Lazar’s cheekbone. It doesn’t faze him. Lazar doesn’t react just -  gives his hands a shake, his eyebrows gathering together in frustration. “If you would __listen__!”

__

__Fuck__  him - he makes an aborted lunge at Lazar with his whole body. Or would, if either of them would let go of him.  Lazar snaps back, “Listen! You had scouts too, you used spies!” Exasperated: “You think I shouldn’t have been loyal to my ruler? To the faction that paid my wages?” Low, urgent, he catches his eye, holds his gaze. “You are going to hurt yourself. Didn’t you want to know?”

 

Knowing anything seems impossible.

 

He sags. He’s sore. The sick adrenalin pours out of him, leaves him limp from the exertion and the grief. What did he know of the years between. What did he know of Lazar’s life. Nothing. Ignorance and fear were all that he’d carried with him through the grave. Better dead, after all.

 

He can’t answer. He closes his eyes.

 

Thais presses him back to his pillows slowly even as she loosens her grip. There is a part of him that aches at the contact, for the touch. What kind of king could he have been, anyway, as weak and wanting as he is.

 

It is all too much. He slips into sleep with Laurent at the forefront of his mind.

 

-

 

He wakes to Paschal speaking to him, a low mutter. __Wake up now, wake up.__ He’s a good soldier. He can follow an order.

 

Paschal’s hand is cool and soothing on his brow.

 

“I see that you are __determined__  to give yourself a proper concussion. Your whole line is single minded in a way that simply beggars belief, Auguste.”

 

He grunts.

 

“Yes, I bet you’ve got a wretched headache, haven’t you. Well, I’ve got two cures for you, and you’re in no state to reject either of them.”

 

Not another __salve.__

__

“And how would I make that, when you’ve had all my lanolin? Lazar, the astringent, please.”

 

Auguste tenses.

 

Lazar appears, glowering, over Paschal’s shoulder, hands him a wet cloth which Paschal arranges it over his forehead with military precision. He hisses. It burns - presumably where it’s touching the shiner twin to that on Lazar’s forehead.

 

“Sore? Well I got that __and__  a going over from Pallas for upsetting you, so I hope it stings.”

 

Auguste flushes with shame and pleasure in equal parts. It is nice to be cared for - even if one is equally reviled - or despite it. Cared for regardless of fear.

 

“Lazar,” Paschal chides, “really?”

 

“Pallas thinks I’m a ghost,” he chokes out.

 

Paschal looks at Lazar, who rolls his eyes.

 

“Pallas thinks I’m responsible for the state of your thick skull, so there are misunderstandings all round.”

 

Paschal snorts. “Quite. I am leaving now, to do necessary things. I hope there will be no further head injuries upon my return.” He sails from the room, hat wobbling in his wake, with a last reminder not to remove the cloth from Auguste’s forehead.

 

“Wait,” Auguste says, as soon as he had finished rolling __necessary things__  around his head. “What’s the second cure?”

 

Lazar looks unimpressed. “Me.”

 

“Oh.”

 

He sits down heavily on the end of the bed. Auguste barely gets his leg out of the way in time.

 

“I should have said it differently. About your brother.”

 

Is this an apology? Are they are being ...friendly? It’s not like Lazar is looking at him. He feels his way around his response tentatively.

 

“I should not have… accused you. Like that.” Lazar’s back gets very stiff. Right, right, and - “And I should not have hit you. With my head. Or at all.”

 

“Right,” Lazar says, glaring at the floor. “Not like you’re the first. With either.”

 

Auguste winces. He’d always thought a man had every right to change his lot. Being here made things harder and stranger than they ever had been.

 

He’s halfway to an apology when Lazar says, gruffly: “What I said wasn’t an exaggeration. I was a mercenary. I did spy on him.” He clears his throat. “But that’s how I knew who you were.”

 

-

 

Lazar tells him about it. Arles was sprawling, he said. The biggest building in his town had six rooms. It was, he said, overwhelming. And at seventeen, a dozen dead men under his belt, he mostly wanted to nap. He described the sheer number of people in the palace. That you couldn’t take a lean in an antechamber without finding that you’d interrupted a couple fucking behind a curtain or interrupted the delicate bit of a deal. Sometimes they were the same thing. Was there nowhere here that was cool, calm and fuck-less?

 

And then he had hit upon the crypt.

 

“I’d go there to sleep during the really stinking hot bit of the day. In one of the wall-cuttings, out of sight from the entrance if anyone came looking, you know?” No one did, at first. The only person that spotted him was “this statue on the other side of the crypt. Who gives a funeral carving open eyes? Anyway, right in my line of sight.”

 

Auguste, who had studiously avoided the crypt out of stern self-preservation all his (first) life, didn’t recognise the description. But he acknowledged that open eyes were generally considered to be an upsetting - even __inelegant__ \- choice.

 

“Glad you agree. It was you.”

 

Truly? Truly. Not that you could really tell, because it was fucking awful.

 

“I didn’t even see the prince the first eight months I was in Arles; he was always in Chastillon, but that stopped after his sixteenth birthday.”

 

And that, too, had been the end of Lazar’s ‘secret’ napping spot. The first time -

 

“He bawled a lot. But then he kept coming back. And then I realised he was the prince.”

 

Word evidently got around. Because then - dragged by his ear like a child to his captain’s captain, and informed nicely that he could keep up his ‘secret’ naps on the condition that he did in fact not nap at all, and instead listened very carefully for anything that distraught young man might have to say.

 

Lazar clears his throat.

 

“And so I did. I did it well, and I thought nothing of it, and I did it looking you dead in the eye. The King doesn’t care. I’ve been a sellsword, I’ve been a traitor.”

 

And then, without petulance or pride, he says -

 

“I don’t think I’m either now.”

 

Auguste feels like he’s in two places at once, here and now but also there, standing over his own grave, marble hand outstretched to Laurent at his feet, his eyes, open, unblinking - and locked on gleam of Lazar’s eyes in the dark.

 

-

  
  
  
  
  


 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The unofficial title of this fic is ‘Auguste is back n he is fuckin pissed’, so. 
> 
> Unbeta'd


End file.
